Commenting, as it is today, treats you people like shit. It’s a bad word, sorry, I don’t like swearing on a medium that can be read by small kids, but it’s true. The fact that you have to put your wise words next to trackbacks, spammers, and idiots, is insulting in itself—something that is perhaps more apparent when commenting on a Techcrunch post. Also that your words will then essentially become open sourced adds to the trouble, something that every blogger faces too, of course.

A couple of interesting thoughts about where commenting is going came up this last year, such as:

• Disqus, which allows you to be in control of your comments, also edit them, which I find a worthwhile addition.
• Fred Wilson, who wrote about having people change the blog post as needed, in a Wiki-like fashion. This would never work out practically, we bloggers are way to egocentric, but collaborative thought-collection and -expression is something I’m a big believer in.
• TidBits, an Apple-focussed site, that collects comment in the form of an email-discussion, something I find appealing.
• Kottke, Daring Fireball, Seth Godin, 43folders, all of which don’t allow comments, though welcome mail and track-backs (kottke has the occasional thread).

I want to do a little market research exercise here. Basically what I’m thinking about is to allow for trackbacks and allow you to comment via a mailing list, something that may also cut down on spam. I want to know how you feel about that. If I receive a high approval or “don’t care either way” percentage, I’ll go for it and this blog post will be my* last to allow for public comments (Edit: actually, even if the answer is to use mail, it will still take a while, a week or two, to implement it. So this won’t be the last post.). Interesting comments will be added to the bottom of my posts as well, allowing rss-readers to easily check them without having to click through to the site. If the poll shows that you would prefer to keep the old system, then it stays. That’s democracy for you!

So do me a favour and answer the following poll:

[polldaddy poll=1259855]

If you’re really opposed to this, make your argument in a comment.

What commentators said:

Wine Blog, the first and only commentator asked me if I wanted to stop people from giving me feedback on my post. That isn’t my objective at all! But it did lead me to another thought. Another reason why a mailing list is better is that you will know when someone respond to your comment. Having to go back to a random site, instead of receiving a note in your mail, is terribly inefficient.

David thinks that it’s important for some to have their names & thoughts connected to their own sites. I can’t argue with that. A mailing system would certainly not give people the option to market their sites as openly as usual. Of course, I did say that track-backs would still work.

Vincent

*: this would just be for my posts, I am not the boss of Tech IT Easy!

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