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Disclose: I'm a founder of a commenting system I have worked with bloggers and news sites over the last 2 years, and are some things I have learned: * Comments give a better sense of the your audience. Take Youtube for example. When you see comments in a video, you know what kind of audience that channel has, and what the audience like. Same for blogs.
* Comments give new visitors an idea how good/bad your blog post is. For example, take a programming tutorial. When there are comments about the article, you can make a better decision whether you should use the code examples in your application. Don't forget that stackoverflow is built on user comments. People are not going to search the article you shared on Twitter to find out comments. (If you only share on Twitter/HN, make sure to link the Twitter/HN discussion at the bottom, like Cloudflare blog does)
* Comments let you build your own audience, which you own. Just think, what happens when Twitter bans you? However, * When new bloggers do not get comments from their audience, they become discouraged. I have seen people really excited about starting their new blog and adding our commenting system, and they just say after a few weeks, they just remove comments from their blog because they don't get comments. The fact is that getting comments on your blog is harder than getting a comment on social media. The obvious reason is that the user has to "signup". Okay, so what if make commenting easier? For example, just with username. So, we make commenting public. It works fine until you are flooded with spam comments. Tools like Akismet do a good job on detecting spam. The real problem comes when people start to publish non-spam but not-so-good comments on your blog. This is when you need moderating... manual moderating. It requires time. Finally, to answer your question: Are blog comments a thing of the past? It is a decision of the blogger. Some like to have public discussions, but some like to have it in Twitter DMs or emails. Some don't care about moderating but some do. From my experience, most news sites I worked with REALLY care about their commenting section, and they invest a lot in software and moderation teams to have nice, engaging conversations on their websites. |