Breaking Blogosphere Obligations? Comment Communication

A contact of mine was recently asking about the idea of me creating a blog for them. Among the many things he wanted, he asked “I just have to figure out how to respond to any future comments within an hour or so.” I told the person that they did not need to feel obligated to respond to comments, and that they did not need to have comments in the first place. It was their personal blog, and they could have anything they wanted without feeling obligated to do what the blogosphere was doing. The person just looked at me bewildered and then started laughing as if I was joking that it was not necessary to respond quickly or to even have a comments section.

This is the first in a series of articles where I will focus on some blogosphere obligations where many people assume that doing something is required, when in reality doing such a thing may cause harm or more harm than good. As the above example shows, today I would like to focus on the communication aspect of obligations when it comes to commenting. This is critical in appreciating, for commenting because of obligation means you are not commenting to appreciate but to fulfill an obligation, a duty that you feel exists on a level higher than the level of appreciation.

The obligations listed below are slowly becoming the norm on any new blog, where the blogger is usually criticized if they do not follow the same bandwagon as the rest of the blogosphere. Let us start with the idea of enabling comments, then disabling comments, and then working our way through responding to comments as an idea and responding to comments individually as a practical act.

Enabling comments

Is it an obligation to enable comments? Simply having comments as an obligation is not a good thing. I would rather have no comments than to have a comments area that I have kept as an obligation. Not having comments is not a bad thing: when you have reasons that do not manipulate others, you can do many things without feeling any obligation. Many people can have comment alternatives, and many people simply want to talk. Sure, simply talking and not listening can be considered bad in many aspects, but if someone wants to talk with a good heart and not manipulate others to their disadvantage, there does not seem to be anything wrong with it unless they also want to make sure that other people involved in their talks do not benefit from such talks.

Now, this very obligation of enabling comments is abused when performed on many major blogs: many blogs enable comments and think they have done a huge favor to everyone, a favor that cannot be repaid. In such cases, appreciation is usually a fake form of marketing tactic employed to gain more commentors and to retain many existing ones. Simply enabling communication does not mean you are better: it means you now have a new world of commentors that you can abuse or help. With enabled comments come a lot of new responsibilities. Whether you help or manipulate the commentors, to better your site ranking, income, popularity, etc, also decides whether or not your act of enabling the comments was good for the readers in addition to being good for you and your site. This is very important when measuring the honesty level of any of your appreciation efforts.

Disabling comments

A small, yet growing number of blogs are starting to disable their comments once they reach a certain stage where the number of new visitors outpaces the number of loyal or returning visitors. Many times, some blogs and bloggers feel that it is an obligation to disable comments when the number of comments are too large to be handled by the owners of the blog. Keeping that in mind, is it an obligation to turn off the comments if a blogger cannot maintain the comments section of their blog properly? Turning off comments may seem like a good solution for many very popular sites and blog. However, not all communication revolves around the blogger maintaining the comments section, and thus not disabling comments in every situation can work out well also in many cases. Disabling comments can mean both appreciation and no appreciation, depending on each situation and blogger.

This very obligation of disabling comments is abused many times on many other levels also. One aspect of disabling comments is the idea of turning off comments on posts that cause controversy, or posts where the blogger feels that the amount of damage the comments can cause outweigh the benefits of having comments enabled for those certain posts. I feel that the obligation of disabling comments on posts simply to stop any conflict or something similar is not always a mature decision that benefits parties other than the blogger: disabling comments simply causes people to basically shut up, and does not address the very issue of the conflict itself. Do we only want others to talk because we want them to say thins we want to hear? If I remember correctly, I have never disabled comments on any of my posts even if there is a lot of hatred in different comments, and I am very happy that I did not. If you do decide to disable comments, you should keep in mind that disabling comments is not always a solution: it is a tool to come up with a solution.

Responding to all comments

The art of responding to comments is slowly becoming an obligation in the eyes of a growing number of bloggers, not because it allows for the communication and people to actually do something, but because many bloggers feel that if someone talks, someone else has to respond. Is it an obligation to respond to all comments? There has to be a reason why someone would think so, and it is very immature to think that all comments need a response simply because someone at RA Project says so. Your own reason needs to be developed, and you need to decide whether or not you want to respond to all comments. Responding to all comments does not always necessarily mean appreciation we I will explain a bit briefly below.

It is not a bad thing to not respond to all comments, and it is not bad to not respond to all comments immediately. I like responding to people and thoughts, and not comments. That is why many times I try to take my focus away from the comments area and into e-mails, texts or other forms of communication. I have about a 100 or so comments I need to respond to as of today, and I am taking my sweet time in writing up responses to all of them and making sure I communicate with the people both through comments and away from the comments area: I have to think about many things, and have to come up with honest opinions and responses to ensure I communicate what I want to say, whether it is through a single sentence or a few paragraphs. My focus is on the communication with that person and understanding the topic at hand, and not to show how fast I reply or to show the blogosphere my comment response rate.

Of course, it is interesting to see a lot of new bloggers trying to do the same with completely different intentions, intentions that usually revolve the idea that if one does not respond to all comments, someone will surely criticize that blogger or blog. As with the other obligations of communication through comments, this obligation of responding to all comments is abused by many people: many people are replying to each and every comment because they feel it is their job to do so. They do it to increase the popularity of their blogs, and they also respond like robots to everyone, thanking everyone for their comment whether or not they actually want to thank them. “Thank you” seems like the new “I love you“, thrown out anytime we want to start a canned response that is customized a little bit to show that we are acting like humans.

Responding to individual comments individually

This goes along with the obligation of responding to all comments. Responding to individual comments individually means that you respond to each separate comment and commentor with a new, separate comment response different and apart from all of your other comment responses. Many people write a single response to all commentors, and many people write a single comment addressing all commentors individually. Still, many other people reply to each commentor separately. You are not obligated to do any of these. You have to decide yourself how you wish to address each commentor. It is slowly becoming a commercialized idea to respond to individual comments and to respond to several comments as whole through a single comment and a single thought, when all these years personal blogs have been doing it time and over again without wanting anything, and without feeling obligated, and through other styles also. Appreciation through individual responses can help, but appreciation is not guaranteed simply because one responds to individual comments individually.

Now, the very act of responding to individual comments is abused also. Many people respond individually in order to increase their comment count. Many people do it because they feel obligated, and because they “have” to respond to each comment in order to gain more readers and in order maintain current readers. The very feeling of wanting to respond without wanting anything in return other than the other person’s good feeling, whether or not they stay, is going away. Many people feel obligated to respond to comments because they simply feel that they have to keep up with the blogosphere. I know of so many bloggers who come along and start responding to individual people, that when you stop going to their site, they distance themselves and focus only on the people who comment on their side. In my view, this obligation has played one of the major roles in destroying the human connection and the concept of friendship that people may have had in the online world.

What do you think?

The above are the 4 different and major obligations when it comes to communicating through comments, and these obligations play a huge role in determining whether or not one is appreciating or whether one is simply fulfilling their blogging obligation. From enabling to disabling comments to the idea of responding to comments to the act of responding to individual comments, the different forms of comment interaction allow people to either feel obligated into doing something or to avoid something because of the same obligations. Those are the different communication through comments related obligations that many bloggers, if not the majority, feel daily while running their blogs. An obligation with a reason can be good, while an obligation without a personal reason can be bad. The above points are both good and bad, depending on what the underlying reasons for their existence are.

Can you think of any time when you ran into any situation related to any of the above points? Have you seen anyone do any of the above in a good or bad manner? How much impact do you think these obligations and trends have on appreciation, as a blogger, as a reader and as a commentor?

Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for the next time when we tackle the obligation of communicating by posting regularly.

Other RA Project Articles

• Case Study: Google disabling external urls in Blogger.com comments (18)
• In what ways do you appreciate your readers? (2)
• Would you give up all of your blog income for your readers? (3)
• Where Are the Weekend Bloggers? (8)
• Measuring comment responses (5)

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