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It’s the comments stupid

by Steven Hodson on December 28, 2008 · Comments

catversationWe – as human beings – live and grow mentally because of the conversations we have. Without that constant flow of ideas and mental stimulation we would never strive to grow and improve. If we only talk to ourselves within our own minds we run the very real risk of stagnating and being left behind in the evolutionary race. After all it is our ability to communicate and think that has made us the dominant creature on this planet.

Whether it is a concerted effort or not we seem to be hell bent on trying to do everything we can to reduce our shared thoughts and ideas down to the smallest number of words as possible. It is as if we are becoming afraid of expressing ourselves with any depth or verbosity.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the world of online social media.

Services like Twitter are praised as the medium of future online communication with its main drawing card being the 140 character limitation. Even FriendFeed while it allows more than 140 characters it still has limitations on the number of characters allowed both in original messages and comments. Arguably there is nothing wrong with conciseness, as verbal diarrhoea is just as destructive to constructive thought and conversation; but to suggest that ideas and conversation should be easily digestible bite size pieces does us all a disservice.

The common consensus among the early adopters within social media is that services like Twitter and aggregators like FriendFeed are the ideal tools for communication on our road forward. For them the art of skimming RSS feed headlines is no longer enough. Now we must be able to communicate our ideas in the shortest way possible. For them the idea of commenting on things like blogs; which naturally allow for more in depth conversation are a thing of the past.

I couldn’t disagree more. As Fred Wilson wrote in a post this morning

I was going through the comments to the ‘Bits Of Destruction’ post this morning and there’s this great back and forth between two frequent commenters about the bank panic of 1907 and JP Morgan’s role in it. That’s the kind of conversation that just didn’t exist for most people pre-Internet. You could get it in college dorms, bars and coffee shops in the right towns and cities to some degree, but certainly not late at night in your pajamas in your studio apartment.

This reminded me of Chris Brogan’s idea of cafe shaped conversations and the fact that none of the real conversations I have seen taking place on any blog could have happened on Twitter or even FriendFeed. If I had restricted myself to using those tools as people like Robert Scoble and others would have you do I would have missed out on great thought provoking conversations.

Fred’s point about the conversations we are having now not generally being able to happen pre-Internet is right on the money but we seem to be heading back to a time where serious conversations don’t have the same value as cafe styled conversations.

Do services like Twitter and aggregators like FriendFeed serve a purpose? Sure they do - but neither of them are the place to sit and enjoy a long conversation and fresh pressed coffee. For that you still need to head to the comments – that is where the real conversations happen – that is where the real value is.

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Tagged as: blogging, comments, FriendFeed, Twitter

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  • Dude, are you looking over my shoulder? I just wrote about a post about comments over at http://www.patricktalkstech.com/2008/12/28/is-t...

    I agree. Comments are the place for discussion. Twitter reminds me of old Internet chat rooms. Basically, 500 people standing around, all of them talking, but no one really listening and responding. The only difference is Twitter doesn't have the occasional a/s/l appear.

    I enjoy Twitter, but more as a time waster and not a place for serious discourse.
  • I've made the correlation between Twitter and IRC more than a few times but general get shot down over it. :)

    oh and no I wasn't looking over your shoulder :)
  • I share your love for conversation, but I'm not sure how often comment areas on blogs deliver it. Certainly the model breaks down on mega-blogs like Techcrunch, where the comments often devolve into competing monologues. I actually enjoy Twitter as a conversational medium, though I realize many people don't use it that way.

    I don't know how much it is a question of technology. Sure, we need media that make it possible and reasonable convenient to have a conversation. But no technology can make us want to listen to and truly engage one another.
  • Daniel I would like to believe that a lot more serious discussions go in blog comments than we give credit for. I may be off in lala land on that but from my experience so far the signal to noise ratio is a lot less in the comments on blogs.
  • I assume you mean the signal to noise ratio in comments is higher, not lower, and that you're comparing to microblogging media like Twitter.

    Certainly the quality of a conversation benefits from requiring participants to think before they transmit. It's not clear whether enforced terseness helps or hurts in this respect; I always think of the Mark Twain quote about not having enough time to write a shorter letter.

    What I suspect matters most is creating a cultural economy that favors earnest and valuable participation. I rail against anonymity (in general, not just in blog comments) because I feel it usually has the opposite effect. Encouraging people to cultivate reputations associated with their identities strikes me, at least, as elevating the overall quality of conversation.
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