Riccardo Mori

Matt Gemmell has posted Comments Commentary, a very interesting follow-up to Comments Still Off, his other follow-up on his decision to switch comments off for his website. Since I’ve been offline for about nine days, I’m still catching up with dozens of unread articles, and was about to mention Gemmell’s Comments Still Off piece, basically to confirm Matt’s positive experience after disabling comments on my website.

Comments Commentary, however, is even more thorough and incorporates some thought-provoking reactions to Gemmell’s previous piece; if it’s too long for you to follow all the links included there, at least Matt’s final thoughts are really worth a read.

Matt writes:

I think at this point that we can see the general thrust of the arguments on both sides.

For me, there are two ideas of primary interest, which have cropped up repeatedly: humility of the writer, and the purpose of your blog.

The two issues are interlinked, because misunderstanding the author’s purpose for his or her blog can lead to a perception that they lack humility; a perception that manifests itself as all sorts of tortured arguments about the importance of comments themselves, whereas in fact the underlying sentiment is an accusation of rampant egocentrism.

[…]

So, to humility. Putting aside the unpalatable but nevertheless true fact that there’s no requirement for you to be humble on your blog in the first place, I do understand and agree that no reader wants to feel patronised, or that the writer is intolerably arrogant. I feel the same way about the blogs that I read. 

The aspect of the blogger’s humility was mainly raised by Josh Constine’s piece Blogs need comments. Gemmell reports this quote:

Comments keep bloggers humble, honest, accurate, and in touch with their audience. Personally, I enjoy debating with people who think I’m wrong, as long as they’re civil. I really value my commenters and often update my articles with thoughts they’ve inspired or corrections they’ve cited.

It’s not the first time I hear pro-comments people speak of this humility of the blog’s author. As I replied to Matt Gemmell via Twitter, I’ve noticed that many people who favour a ‘comments enabled’ policy seem to give more importance to the comments themselves rather than the original article. I have many blogs and tech sites that allow comments in my reading list, and the instances where some comments have proven to be equally insightful or more insightful than the original article are quite rare. I’ve read ‘me-too’ comments and ‘first!’ comments, polite comments showing agreement or disagreement with the original piece (which are probably the best category), and then a lot of snarky, rude, disrespectful, holier-than-thou, patronising comments, which do not have value nor generate any healthy discussion. They’re toxic waste coming from people with an ego problem. 

And the original author should allow this drivel because it keeps him/her humble? Where’s the commenter’s humility? 

I’ve seen a lot, a lot of arrogance in most comments I’ve come across on the Web in the last ten years. From people taking advantage of anonymity and the great ease offered by most comment systems to basically tell the blog author that he/she is an idiot and how he/she should approach the things he/she is writing about. Condescending attitudes from strangers who leave their mark on your site or blog to show you how informed, how smart, how savvy they are. 

Again I ask, if comments “keep bloggers humble, honest, accurate and in touch with their audience”, what keeps commenters humble, honest, accurate, etc.? We are in dire need of a change of attitude as commenters, and ought to start showing humility when we enter someone else’s space to voice our opinion. We as commenters must realise that maybe what we do or think is not The Revealed Truth, that maybe everything is not black or white. Think about this before ‘demanding’ humility from a blog or website’s author.

I don’t know if my writing strikes you as particularly humble or arrogant. What I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty is that I do my best to write original essays and observations with professionalism, avoiding superficiality and, most of all, avoiding covering things I don’t know much about. I do what I do here because I love it and because I want to provide quality content. This, not leaving comments enabled, is what drives my writing and what keeps me humble, honest, accurate. And judging from how some readers have reacted after I closed comments here — they kept writing me via email or Twitter — I can say I haven’t lost touch with my audience.

Finally, this is the part where I most agree with Matt Gemmell, and the key to understand both my and his decision to disable comments:

I don’t feel, personally, that a blog must have comments — but it seems that many people do. The reason, I believe, is that many see the purpose of a blog to be a kind of noticeboard of thoughts. Something that’s implicitly in the public domain, and thus fair game for on-site comments and such. Something that exists outside the personal domain of its author; indeed, a public extension of that person.

Others, including myself, have a different purpose in mind. To me, a blog is an extremely personal thing. It’s entirely within my personal domain, and is far more like a collection of essays than a noticeboard. I put a great deal of effort into these pieces, and I have a correspondingly proprietorial view of the blog itself. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position.

So, to those who see no-comments as a violation of democracy, I see no such democracy here. You imagine that I’m trying to remove your right to attach a note to a public noticeboard, or to participate in a town-hall debate (which would indeed be reprehensible of me, and a violation), but from my perspective, I’m asking you not to scribble on my newspaper, or to be boorish at my dinner party. It’s simply down to a different perception of the purpose, and thus degree of ownership, of a blog as a whole. To me, this is my home on the internet. You’re most welcome to visit as often as you like, and to stay for as long as you like, and I’m sure you’ll understand if I retain the right to set the rules while you’re here.

I collaborate with the Italian edition of iCreate magazine, and among other things, I write a column called Appunti (in English, it would be Clipboard). I’ve been receiving some emails, recently, written by intelligent interlocutors who wanted to know more about me and with a couple of them I had the pleasure to engage in a bit of email back-and-forth. You know, a good old written correspondence, a conversation.

At one point, since we were talking about social networks, one of them asked me which social communication medium I find most effective.

I replied: email.

Although I could not see his face, it was clear by the way he reacted that my answer had taken him aback. In his response, he asked me if I was just being provocative for the sake of it. No, I was not and am not. I already gave him a more detailed answer, but I thought it was worth writing about that here as well.

In recent times, email has become the main complaint from many tech bloggers. Some declared email bankruptcy, some stated that email as a medium is broken, not aging well and needs an overhaul, a complete rethinking, and so on and so forth. But I agree with Khoi Vinh, who wrote, back in September:

Don’t Break What’s Not Broken

In spite of that, I still think email works better than just about any other communication medium out there. It’s not just that it’s ubiquitous and universally understood; or that I fully own my email address and its domain; or that I can access my email from any number of clients, desktop or Web or mobile or tablet; or that I really can answer it in my own sweet time. For me, the bottom line is that email works great. I don’t have any serious trouble keeping up with it and, so long as I’m not working with insane people who send poisonous diatribes over email, I kind of enjoy it.

Email is not broken, if you ask me. It could be better, for sure, but I don’t think it requires the drastic changes that so many other people seem to believe are necessary. And I certainly don’t need messaging intermediaries entering the picture. These alternatives just fracture what is for me a pretty well consolidated experience — if you want to reach me, my email address is pretty easy to find and I, in turn, know the one place I should turn to check to see if you’ve reached me.

When I say that email is, for me, the most effective means to a social network, the first obvious objection people make is that there are other, more convenient platforms, and the usual suspects get promptly outlined: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, you name it. And perhaps it’s true, their interfaces are rather straightforward, you generally get the hang of them quickly, and they all give you a certain reach. This last aspect is key. All these social networks are horizontal. They are like enormous places to hang where each user has their own place to broadcast their persona, their views, the things they share, etc. to the Internet wilderness, and other people may decide to form aggregates around this user, for the most varied reasons: they know him/her in real life, they know him/her from other forums, they recognise him/her as that guy/girl with that interesting blog or podcast, they don’t know him/her but like the style and the way he/she broadcasts his/her opinions, and so on.

Meaningful things can develop from this kind of interaction, I won’t deny that also because it would contradict my own experience, but with people you had no previous knowledge of (most of your ‘followers’), the depth of your connection and interaction is usually shallow. Sometimes on Twitter I have the distinct feeling it’s like entering a very crowded pub filled with people you half-know, and while you’re making your way to the counter, you overhear interchanges and bits of conversations that briefly catch your interest and you stop for a little while to add your quick observations on the matter.

Facebook, Twitter, Google+ et al., all have mechanisms to focus on deeper, more private exchanges, but at that point they’re no better than the good old email.

Email is vertical. There is no broadcast, no egotism. But there can be good, private, deep conversations. Even among a small group of people. I have had intense email correspondences over the years. I have used email to build projects, to arrange meetings and outings, to send notifications… To communicate in what I think has been an effective manner.

Email today is perceived as ‘problematic’ because it isn’t felt as being convenient or ‘fast’ as other social media. The cynic in me thinks that people are more interested in other social media exactly because they provide the means to broadcast their selves more publicly and more conveniently, and to engage in shallower interactions since, you know, we’re all living busy lives and can’t be bothered to form really deep, meaningful interactions (or friendships altogether) with people who live so far away. Under this light, social networks are more like ‘individualistic networks in a shared virtual place’.

Back to my surprised interlocutor, I told him: the proof of email’s effectiveness is that we’re having this very exchange. You got in touch with me through the magazine and through my website. You showed up out of the blue, but writing thoughtful things in an elaborate, relaxed message. Email itself invited you to express yourself that way, without forcing constraints related to space or content. I chose to respond accordingly, and the conversation went on. Perhaps after this, we’ll never cross paths again, or perhaps we’ll contact each other in the future for one reason or another, but whatever the case, we’ve had this correspondence, which has been anything but superficial.

I know: email is not a social network platform, per se. And I know email alone doesn’t really have reach. The obvious advantage of the usual social networks is that you’re more exposed and ‘discoverable’, so it may be easier to find kindred spirits there. In fact, I’m not saying email should replace social networks, I’m simply advocating email as an effective and rather straightforward medium to communicate with other people on a deeper level than limiting yourself to ‘interactions’ through Twitter or Facebook or whatever. It takes a little effort from the parts involved, for sure, but in my experience that is often worthwhile and rewarding in the medium-long term.