Wednesday, August 06, 2008

John Hawks and Comments

John Hawks is writing a series on blogging and tenure. In the last installment, How to blog, get tenure and prosper: A very useful engine, he discusses reasons for blogging. You should read the whole thing, but I'd like to focus on one small part.

John Hawks does not allow comments on his blog. It's the only science blog that I know of with a no-comment policy.1 Here's why, according to Hawks,
For some people, the most rewarding part about a blog is the immediate feedback from comments. Others dislike the comment section, whether it’s the constant battle against spam, or the trolls, or the pressure to respond to comments.

Personally, I can let a question sit in my inbox for a long time (as some of you know!), but I wouldn’t tolerate it sitting unanswered on my site. That’s my most important reason for not having a comments section: I think about posts, and I think about replies, and comments don’t generally give much time for thinking. The sites I like the best take a hybrid approach: They include questions or comments from readers, but do not have a “comments section” for each post. That kind of full-moderation, indirect feedback still can provide the sense of interaction and community, but without the repetition, trolling, and off-topic digressions that often emerge in comments sections. That’s only my preference, though—you may feel differently.

Will your commenters hurt your tenure case? I don’t think it really matters whether you have comments or not, assuming that you keep out the spam and discourage bad behavior. Probably the most important thing, as I’ll describe in the next installment, is that you mind your university’s use guidelines. As long as you follow the rules, your readers and evaluators are almost certainly smart enough to understand that your commenters are not you.

A healthy, lively comment ecosystem will add to the value of your blog. Your regular commenters help to give your site an identity by giving it a sense of community. Pointing to the community element can help to sell your site to your committee. University mission statements often include ideas like “building learning communities,” or “providing to underserved communities” (more on this in part 4 of the series). A healthy comments section is evidence that you are indeed serving a community.

An anemic comment ecosystem, mostly a monoculture invaded by the occasional weed, will subtract value from your blog. Imagine that someone visited one of your classes. Would you want to show a class where the students just wouldn’t participate? Or where one student always stood up after the lecture and announced that your ideas were garbage? You don’t want to say you’re serving an active community, while your blog comments appear to give concrete evidence that you’re not.

As you approach your tenure review, you have to think carefully about how to sell your blog to a committee. Then take action: Shut down your comments for a while, or put them on full moderation, encourage your e-mailers to submit comments, or make a concerted effort to draw comments from students or people in your field. As you plan ahead, you can think of the best way to accentuate the positives, and a small force applied early may save a lot of explaining later.
Since you can't discuss these ideas on John's blog, I'm giving you the chance here. From my prespective, comments are the most fun part of blogging. I love the discussions that go on in the comments and I love to provoke debate by posting on controversial topics. It's what science is all about, as far as I'm concerned. I've learned a lot from commenters who disagree with what I write.

I don't ever want to censure anyone who comments on my blog—although there are one or two who test my patience. Personally, I don't think the downside of commenting is all that bad and it does very little to diminish the upside. On the other hand, there are blogs where the chaff is much more obvious than the wheat and I don't even bother reading the comments. I don't know how you would prevent that.


1. It's also one of the few blogs from a university professor with a disclaimer at the bottom of each posting. I wonder if this is a special rule at the University of Wisconsin?

8 comments:

  1. Yup, comments definitely the way to go.

    Personally I feel that science bloggers who allow unmoderated comments and use their real names are open-minded, gutsy, trustworthy and totally bad ass.

    I also suspect that they are also far better looking than other science bloggers.

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  2. The very, very rare times I have had comments they were certainly welcome (apart from some arse who asked me if I was brain damaged). It certainly is nice to know someone read what you said and thought it was worth taking the time to reply.

    Some blogs that have too many comments certainly take away from the benefit of having comments at all. Frankly I cannot be bothered to look at Pharyngula's comments section because there are just too bloody many people twittering on at the same time about the same thing.

    So, like most things, comments are good in the moderate area and annoying in the extremes (like I said, I hardly get comments and it makes me sad).

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  3. "Some blogs that have too many comments certainly take away from the benefit of having comments at all."

    Very true. The best blogs have a moderate number of very diverse commenters, including those you like and those you don't (and I might just be one of those that test Larry's patience from time to time). This blog seems to fit in that category. If this blog ever becomes too successful, I'll probably take it off my list.

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  4. "1. It's also one of the few blogs from a university professor with a disclaimer at the bottom of each posting. I wonder if this is a special rule at the University of Wisconsin?"

    No, it isn't.

    Ann Bughouse doesn't have such a deal.

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  5. Big difference:

    You have a tenure, John needed to get one. You blog just because you can, John cleverly used the fun of it to help advance his career. Lots of stupid/politically incorrect comments is politically bad idea. Guilt by association and all that.

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  6. Thanks, Larry -- I've been out of town so I didn't see this until today.

    I guess I have enough fun with the e-mail I get. Somehow people spend more time thinking (and fact-checking) if they are taking the time to write an e-mail. Even though I get fewer, they are more enjoyable to read.

    I follow a number of field-specific newsgroups that frequently comment on what I've written. In terms of "serving a community" I think that those do a better job than a comments section.

    And of course I also encourage people to blog on their own!

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  7. I don't understand Hawk's paranoia.
    All his advice is just about being extremely anal and playing it safe.
    His problem of feeling he must answer every comment is just silly.

    I guess he expects nobody's comments could ever be of interest. Or a valid criticism he should be more aware about. He apparently has not yet imagined that there could be such "benefits" to blogging.

    A blog without comments is just a new website. REAL blogs are open, uncensored arenas of discussion, so the quality of your blog increases with the quality of the readers and comments.

    What would be the quality of Hawk's comments section? Well, I guess we'll never know. Maybe it would just suck, kind of like he assummess it will.

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  8. Hawks OK'd the publication of the "palau man" paper which has since been added to the pantheon of shame, since these happen to be the remains of normal human beings...

    "Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized"

    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003015

    Of course, this comment could look very, very bad on Hawk's blog hahah

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