Initially closing off comments?

Posted July 2nd, 2009 by Dan Ronken

Hi all,

What is your opinion on closing off comments until a decent amount of readership is built? If I see a blog with large number of posts and no comments on any of them, it feels less engaging to me.

Dan Ronken

danronken.com

twitter.com/danronken

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Closing off Comments is Shutting Doors

Suzanne Vara 1 year 2 weeks 6 days 21 hours ago

Dan

Closing off comments is like shutting the door in someone's face or walking into a room and only talking about yourself and then leaving. Blogging is to engage by educating and not allowing comments can backfire. What if someone has a question? They would have to go and find an email and then send it that way. People are just not going to take the extra time to go that extra step when a million other blogs allow comments.

While is it a bit unnerving to be the first to leave a comment sometimes, it is engaging the person who took the time to write the blog who will undoubtedly return the favor. As Adrian said - help em out by leaving a comment.

It is about building the relationship with the big folks and the smaller ones. That is what we did with IMU - should we expect that every member of IMU will go and read of our blogs, no but at the same time, we will be sure to take a peek at them

Suzanne Vara

twitter.com/Lvadgal

No comment is like Communism

Adrian Chira 1 year 2 weeks 6 days 23 hours ago

No comment is like Communism. I have lived those tomes and you were not allowed to say anything else than the official view. And finally were it has lead us?

Coming back to your question you should have a way to communicate with your readers. It cannot be only in one direction (you tell the world and the world is just listening). If you let everybody comment or you select only the persons that have a blog (as in Seth Godin's case) you still want to let that door opened.

And if you have hundreds of posts and no comment than you have a problem. May be you did not invite the people to comment or your posts are not intriguing enough, or they do not start the conversation. You always can ask your friends to post their opinions on your blog and show that you care. So if you find a site with no comments, help the poor guy and leave a comment.

Best,

Adrian

I wouldn't shut off comments

Brian Rogers 1 year 3 weeks 6 days 2 hours ago

I wouldn't shut off comments as that would delay when people start commenting! Leave them open.

If you're worried about no comments, once you get the blog going, email some of your good friends to go in there and leave some comments to spur the conversation.

the ability to comment is huge

RickBurnes 1 year 3 weeks 6 days 3 hours ago

Hi Dan,

I don't think it's worth doing something like that.

For users, the ability to comment is far more apparent than the ratio comments/posts.

To me, a blog w/o a commenting option is a newspaper, and we all know how those are doing :) (I say that as a former journalist.)

In all seriousness, the key to building a blog is building relationships. That happens in the comments, and it happens slowly. You have to build one relationship at a time, and the content will be thin at the beginning. But if you keep at it, and do it well, the activity will increase.

That's my $.02!

Rick

Why Seth Godin doesn't allow comments

A.M. McReynolds 1 year 3 weeks 6 days 41 min ago

Dan,

Let me play devils advocate. Blog commenting requires ... rules of engagement. Is commenting really about building authentic relationships or about SEO (i.e. backlinks)?

Take Seth Godin as a case in point:

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.... So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I'd have to choose the latter.

Instead, he encourages trackbacks − "an effective way to encourage non-anonymous communication between blogs."

For him, it's about tribe management: ... "what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about."

This permission, for example, comes in the form of RSS readers.

So decide if you want to join their community − whereever it is....

A.M. McReynolds

Great Insights!

Dan Ronken 1 year 3 weeks 6 days 11 min ago

I appreciate the input from all of you. I certainly see the logic from all of the angles you have presented. The consistent theme that is reinforced throughout all of my research and participation in social media is the importance of building relationships not just a quick connect. Well, I suppose that can be debated as well because it's impossible to build an unlimited amount of relationships. I once heard a figure of the amount of people that you can manage to have meaningful relationship with at one time is roughly 150. Any more than that, the quality of relationships start to diminish.

Dan Ronken

Dunbar!

RickBurnes 1 year 3 weeks 6 days 3 min ago

Ha! It's funny you mention that number. Anne-Marie mentioned it the other day on Twitter, which sent me scrambling the figure out exactly what it is. It's Dunbar's Number: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_number

Even More Funny...

Dan Ronken 1 year 3 weeks 5 days 23 hours ago

I saw that tweet from her a little bit ago as well and was planning on lookng it up too! I got distracted and ended up here before searching and "POOF" here it is as a link in your reply. I think I first heard it from Malcomn Gladwell and then Chris Brogan brought it up too!

Godin's "Friendlies" and Dr. Dunbar's Number

A.M. McReynolds 1 year 3 weeks 5 days 20 hours ago

[EXCERPT] The Economist: "Primates on Facebook"

... Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr. Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as 'the Dunbar number.'"

So The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the 'in-house sociologist' at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent with Dr. Dunbar’s hypothesis, and that women tend to have somewhat more than men.

Seth Godin's definition of 'friendlies' gives credence to Dunbar's number: "I want to distinguish friends from 'friendlies', the people you have a digital link to, but no real connection. Friendlies are basically strangers with a thumbnail of their face on your screen."