Comments, No Comments, and When It Doesn't Matter

Today I’ve been heckling D’arcy Norman on Twitter about his plan to try out turning off comments on his blog. The discussion of comments versus no comments is not new but has come to the forefront again because of Gruber’s defence of not allowing comments.1 D’Arcy has done a good job showcasing several opinions on the matter - so good read his post first.

Why would I want comments on my site? They provide a relatively frictionless (provided no registration is required) way for a reader to respond to something I have written to power Google’s index.2 This includes developers responding to my criticisms of their applications, or some method of feedback. The feedback is part of the reason I even write comments anywhere else. It’s still very possible to get a large volume of feedback relevant and helpful to the article/essay/what-have-you without detracting from it. (eg. Coding Horror as an example - not always, not perfect but on a whole a decent example) Comments at one time also help differentiate the “new media” from the “old media”, it promoted the idea that the reader could be involved instead of just a a passive listener.

Why do I think I should remove comments from my site? Spam and focusing on the content. I don’t like being required to run Akismet, or remembering the issues of using Moveable Type 2.x and the necessity of MT-Blacklist. Erasing the spam issue is definitely enticing, especially with some many other avenues of feedback.

Additionally once comments grow beyond a certain quantitative threshold they simply become drive by soapboxes or discussion boxes with little to no control of their direction (unless heavily moderated) and relevance to the whole point of the page’s existence. If you really want people to discuss with each other about something you’ve put forward as a conversation piece? Consider setting up a proper forum3 for the thread control so it doesn’t feel like a discussion has been shoehorned into something that doesn’t quite fit correctly. Personally the whole point of my corner of the web is not to make conversation pieces but to showcase something I actually want to broadcast more widely to the world.

But wait. Why should I even care if they’re on or off? Be practical - for many comments are your first way to get feedback without the roadblocks (registration, emailing, etc.) that are necessary to keep the volume manageable for higher volume sites. Comments don’t scale with the purpose of a blog, website, whatever you want to call your little corner of the world wide web. If you’re small enough they don’t exist, if you’re big enough they overshadow or fail completely miserably at being either a way to leave a note for the author or as a discussion board. So in the big picture - the choice doesn’t matter. What matters is whether they are a positive or a negative impact to you, the moment it’s negative kill it - there’s no saving the signal when the noise gets too loud. If it’s positive, keep it.

Don’t sweat it and focus on writing (or doing your thing).

  1. RIP daringfireballwithcomments.net - it was hilarious and a perfect example as to why Gruber should keep his site just the way it is. ↩︎

  2. My traffic consists of 3 people who follow using RSS and about 30 people a day from random search terms. ↩︎

  3. This doesn’t have to be proper forum software such as phpBB and such but they do offer the more advanced features one would want when dealing with diverging threads of discussion. ↩︎

Curious Notes about WebM on YouTube

When looking at one of the trailers (Tetro: Original Trailer) that has been transcoded into WebM. I wanted to compare YouTube’s x264 settings versus their WebM settings. I’ve also uploaded some 1080p footage for more recent footage (in case the H.264 settings had changed between Dec. 2009 and now - which AFAIK they haven’t) to compare. It’s also important to note that the HTML5 access to YouTube videos is only available on non-monetized content.

During my testing I noticed that in the HTML5 Beta on older versions of Chrome and Safari (aka H.264 using browsers) when you select 360p for your video size, YouTube does NOT give you a 360p file - it is actually smaller in terms of resolution (480x270) and has to be upscaled. This is most likely a reason why my initial thoughts on Twitter didn’t match with what I had on paper.

Disclaimer: Subjective paragraph to follow - I’m not an expert and I’m judging just by general visual quality to my eye.

A quick visual inspection shows the WebM version in 360p seem noticeably sharper in terms of details than the 480x270 H.264 which had to be upscaled. The 720p WebM version was close enough to it’s H.264 counterpart. However I did definitely notice with the 360p version, a “quality bump” every once in a while as described in the ratecontrol section of a blog post by one of the x264 developers when criticizing the VP8 specification.

Using MediaInfo Mac the following settings can be found:

Tetro Trailer (Originally encoded 12/26/09)

12 Second Test Clip Uploaded Today

Even though H.264 is definitely better on paper, I think VP8 will do just fine as a replacement for Theora and a competitor to H.264 for use on the web. For the near future (next 3 months IMO) you won’t see a lot of WebM footage available as the playback availability is extremely limited.