Science of Blogging

Comments on a blog are a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when you receive comments it shows that your blog is affecting people enough that they want to respond.  That’s a terrific feeling, and a gratifying one since most blogs (or at least any blog that I’ve been involved with) take weeks or months before they start to receive comments on a regular basis.

But on the other hand, comments often require some sort of response.  The comment might pose a question related to your post, or offer a differing point of view that you’d like to discuss.  The problem is that these responses take time – it takes time to find the information needed to answer questions, it takes time to decide how to craft your response, and it even takes time just sifting through the spam folder or approving comments manually (we have automatic approval on both of our blogs at the moment, which seems to be much better than when we had to approve each comment manually on our original Blogger blog).

The downsides of blog comments have been described best by super-blogger and author Seth Godin:

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. I’m already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.

Personally, I’m of the belief that any blog performing science communication needs to allow comments, since they allow you to engage your readers in a discussion (as opposed to simply broadcasting at them), and they often improve the quality of the information available on your blog by providing different viewpoints or discussion topics (for an excellent look at the pros and cons of comments sections, check out this debate from Think Traffic).

So while I don’t lose quite as much sleep over comments as Seth Godin it can still be a problem if, (like me), you have only a finite amount of time to devote to blogging.   As I’ve argued before, I think that blogging is absolutely worth the time commitment, but you still need to make decisions on the best use of your blog-related time.  So is it worth spending an hour or two per week responding to comments, if it means that you’ll now have less time to write original content?  Keep in mind that unless you’re an uber-blog like Pharyngula, your readers will stop commenting pretty quickly if they see that you’re just ignoring them.  So you need to respond to at least some comments if you want to genuinely engage with people and not simply spam them with your own material. But how do you decide which comments to respond to?

When I have time I try to respond to every comment we receive, but when that’s not possible, this is how I triage them: I try to respond to all direct questions (even if it’s simply to say that I don’t know the answer) and any comment that happens to really pique my interest for whatever reason (usually because I either strongly agree or disagree with the comment).  And if I’m too busy to give a detailed response, then I try to at least thank the person for taking the time to comment.  It’s not ideal, but I’ve left plenty of comments on other blogs that have been completely ignored, and would have loved to receive a “Nice thoughts, thanks for contributing to the discussion” in return.

And finally, there is the issue of “problematic” comments. This is a huge reason why many people are afraid to enter social media in the first place, and can include things like vulgarity and personal attacks, but can also include questions about specific personal medical questions for those of us blogging about health-related topics.  The medical questions are easy to deal with – don’t practice medicine through social media, whether you’re a physician or not (some good tips for physicians specifically can be found here). Put up a disclaimer saying that you can’t answer personal health questions, and just refer people to it if you feel any questions cross the line.

I find rude and/or inflammatory comments are harder to deal with.  My personal tactic is to respond to every comment as though I were responding to a question at a conference.  For example, if someone is being obnoxious at a conference, you can politely say something like “I’d be happy to discuss this with you after the presentation, but I think it’s time to move on” and that almost always solves the problem.  You can do pretty much the same thing on a blog.  It doesn’t always work but I tend to think that you have a lot to lose from being rude to any commentator, and very little to gain.  Even more so when you blog under your own name.  And if a comment is down-right unpublishable, then you can simply delete it, or delete the offending passages (in which case I make it clear that I’ve edited the comment).  I try to avoid that unless it’s absolutely unavoidable (e.g. the comment is openly racist or included a lot of F-bombs), which has only happened once or twice in 2+ years of blogging.

Most of my blog posts and the comments they receive are pretty uncontroversial, so that has probably coloured my view of comments in general, as well as my strategies for managing difficult comments them in particular.  For an excellent example of how to manage comments on controversial topics, I highly recommend this recent post on autism by Steve Silberman.  He manages to rebut pointed (and sometimes nonsensical) arguments in an extremely professional way, and I think it really enhances the impact of his overall message.

How do you deal with comments?

I’m really curious to hear how other people deal with comments on their blogs.  How do you decide whether or not to respond at all?  Do you publish all comments, or only those that you feel add value to the discussion?  When do you decide not to publish a comment?  And how do you deal with problematic comments?

I look forward to your comments

Travis