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.

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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?