The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.
I’ll admit, I’ve considered this too.
Please don’t 🙂
The thing is nobody ever used them on Re/Code. I barely ever saw comments beneath their articles. Their content appeals more to investors rather than opinionated consumers and enthusiasts.
I wouldn’t blame you. It’s become a mantra, “don’t read below the line”, but still we do, and much of the time we’re confronted with idiocy
Definitely cuts the interest in hanging out at a website. It is good in the sense of not letting trolls get attention. On the other hand, social media is not a replacement. It takes away the immediacy of the discussion. Which on some sites, is really good most of the time. Arstechnica is a good example. The Examiner on the other hand…
If a site garners quality discussion, then I quite enjoy reading the comments, as they can oft times be as good as the original article, and add to the knowledge I take from the article. Following interesting topics through the comments is also far easier than sifting through all the bits of social media where commentary may occur. If, on the other hand the discussion degrades to trolling and flame wars, then removing the option to comment makes sense. Fortunately, this site seems to tend to the former type of comment.
Comments here are usually good. The few times they’re really stupid, though, it makes up for that.
Holy shit. I’ve been reading this site for years and never knew it had comments. LOL
No, don’t do it Jimmy!
Compared to Yahoo or Youtube, The Loop has a very high percentage of reasonable and intelligent comments. Faint praise I guess…
J.D., please don’t. Although I sometimes use Twitter, my preferred method of getting concentrated comments is from the website’s comment’s section.
BTW, you might get more comments on your site if it were possible to comment from mobile devices. I find that I can only comment on this site when I am using my Mac.
the user base and comments on The Loop are quite good compared to most sites. if comments were removed I’d have little reason to continue visiting this site. analysis and critical insight isn’t the writers’ strong suit — so it’s gotta come from the comments.
Better for them. I would go to The Verge much much more if it’s not for those horrendous comments that spammed the site.
As DarrenSaunders remarked, I wouldn’t blame you. But I’d certainly miss some of the back-and-forth here. There are so few venues where I feel comfortable being a pedantic asshole. 😉
This is thr first time i noticed that there ARE comments here. Ooops.
Jim, could you give us an idea of just how much comments-management you have to do? I know from running a forum that while things might appear quite civilised and easy-to-deal-with from the users’ perspective, often there’s a constant pitched battle with spam and nutcases that nobody sees…
Agree with this. I’d click on some of their big Apple exclusives and they wouldn’t have a single comment.
You considered killing the comments on Re/nob’s site?
Seconded. 🙂
Comments work on the iPad, too. Just not the iPhone.
With private comments you typically have a way to remove comments. Facebook etc you don’t
It’s always sad to see a blog with 0 comments on most of its posts. (Well, OK, not always.)
They used to work until the site was updated. Could probably be worked around with Chrome on iPhone.
I’ve repeat visited some articles on this site more than I’ve gone to re/code.
Bad comments are a PITA for the site owner and useless to visitors, but good comments are gold.
As a web developer the comments on articles about web development is often a crucial part, sometimes they contain more useful information that the article itself (“oh, this cool animation code does not work on mobile, good to know!”).
In the Mac/Apple community a lot of comments are really bad, but I still prefer them to nothing. Even though MacStories has a lot of good writing I’ve noticed that I visit them a lot less after they removed comments.
Blog posts, social media and email is great for feedback between a visitor and a site owner, but there almost useless for me as a third party if I want to read that feedback in a central easy-to-find place. The only such place is the comments. Any site owner that says “Oh, I’m getting great feedback on Twitter and email it since we removed comments” only thinks of comments as a two-way communication between two parties.
You have a better class of commentators Jim.
AND, it’s been removed as a bookmark.. Buh..bye..
this site notwithstanding, comments have turned the internet into everyone’s favorite toilet.
Informed commentary and moderated commentary are time consuming.
Using social media commentary adds nothing to the discussion
not first
(you’d miss this kind of quality)