A Geek's Life

James Zhan weighs in on the comment-section-or-not “debate”, ultimately justifying his decision to remove comments from his (Bear) blog. The key point which I can relate to is this:

When I had comment sections on my blog, I found myself frequently checking for new comments and feeling somewhat disappointed when I saw none. It almost made me feel like I was writing blog posts with the main objective to garner comments/engagement rather than self-expression—the main reason I created this blog. When I was writing blog posts, I also found myself worrying about what kind of comments the blog post might bring.

This matches my experience from the early, heady days of my old wordpress blog in which I stumbled on a fairly large community of Nigerian (and Nigerian adjacent bloggers). The comments in those (typically blogspot blogs) covered the gamut of frivolous to thoughtful. During one particularly phase, being the first to comment on a new post became a thing which was celebrated. Many of my internet friends are from that era, discovered first in the back and forth of comments, then migrated to yahoo messenger, the other ubiquitous watering pond of those days. Of course there was the odd online pile on, and after a while it was increasingly clear that folk were optimising for comments rather than for self-expression. In truth though, I for one probably wrote more in that phase due to the comments than I would have otherwise.

I do have comments enabled on here which is the WordPress default. I must admit the odd occasion when someone likes a post or drops a comment does still give me a buzz from being seen. I won’t be chucking out comments from here for now. Who knows what the future might bring though? :)

Note: This post is part of JulyReply