Thursday, April 09, 2015

Why I'm Shutting Down Comments on Weighty Matters

It's not a decision I've entered into lightly.

After a decade of blogging with (at least as I'm writing this post) 2,607 posts and 13,488 comments, it's a big change that I'm going to try out for at least a little while. I no longer have the time to respond to all comments, and as social media has grown, I've noticed that comment numbers on the blog itself have gone down while spam comments have grown. This led me last year to turn on comment moderation that included a captcha, but surprisingly, this didn't turn down the volume of spam, and culling the spam and serving as moderator, has been taking up more and more time. Given the many other avenues of commentary these days, avenues that often have many more comments than here, leaving them live on the blog seems somewhat redundant.

That said, if you're keen to comment, I have no plans to turn off comments over on Weighty Matters' Facebook page where I provide a link to each day's posting. I'm leaving them up there for two reasons. One, I can't stomach not providing people with a venue to tell me I'm wrong. And two, because the volume of comments on Facebook is so much greater than that on the blog, there seems to be almost a native mechanism in place for everyone to keep everyone else in check.

And if you do feel the need to yell at me, you can always find me on Twitter, or simply send me an email (yonifreedhoff at gmail).

Sincerely,
Yoni