Why We’re Removing Comments on Copyblogger

This post by Sonia Simone originally appeared on Copyblogger on 3/24/14. As longtime readers know, Publetariat had to take this same action when the site was brought back following a hacker attack last year.

“Would you ever consider taking comments off Copyblogger?”

When the question was posed during our editorial meeting, my immediate reaction was, “Absolutely not.”

I wasn’t even interested in considering it, because I like conversations. I enjoy seeing what people think of different posts. I like the quick view of what people react to (positively or otherwise), and what seems to need more explanation.

While the comments on the big CRaP websites are mostly pretty awful, I’ve always enjoyed managed comments on real content blogs. Conversations, after all, are typically more interesting than monologues.

But the team and I got together and talked about it. And as we talked, I started to see it differently.

Here’s the distillation of that conversation — the one that led me to say, Okay, let’s do this.

 

First, the conversation doesn’t end

If you’ve been running your own blog for awhile, you probably noticed that comments started to become less frequent when Facebook and Twitter really started to come into their own. (And that’s only picked up speed with the incredible growth of the other social platforms like Google+ and LinkedIn.)

Why? Because the conversation moved to a wider public platform.

 

Click here to read the full post on Copyblogger.