Why I Turned Off Comments

The short answer is that I want to focus more on my writing for the time being. The longer answer is that conversations about and around blog posts are incredibly fractured, and have been for about a decade. One of the great things about blogging from 2005-2010 was the amazing conversations that could happen in the comments section of a post. Blog comments are typically more in-depth and fleshed out, than comments you see on social media, which tend to be more like soundbytes. Before social media sites like Facebook and Twitter went mainstream, blogs were where the commenting action was at. And great comments led to more great comments, and before you knew it, there was a long discussion happening in the comments section that ended up being more valuable than the post itself. In fact, in the early blogging days I always had the goal of writing a post that led to a discussion in the comments section that was more interesting than the post itself.

I’ll write about this more next week, but I think in many ways, social media has hurt our ability to communicate more than it has helped.  And I think that’s readily apparent when you look at the comment section of most blogs. The volume of comments is down sharply across the board. Yet the funny thing is, spam comments keep chugging right along.  So if you are a blogger, you begin to realize that a lot of your comment moderation time is now spent just dealing with spam, whereas a few years ago, it was quite easy to lose a couple of hours a day responding to wonderful comments on your blog. Many prominent bloggers have already dropped comments for this reason alone.

Another reason why I’ve decided to turn off comments is because when I decided to recommit to blogging, one of the promises I made to myself was that I would give myself permission to write about more topics that I want to write about.  It won’t all pertain to marketing, business or anything related, as I talked about yesterday. I quite honestly want the freedom to write about what I want to write about without having to worry about some person who has never read this blog before commenting and saying I am an idiot simply for taking a stance they don’t like. Once I’ve been blogging again for a few weeks, I may decide to reopen comments, we’ll see how it goes.

But I do want to hear from you, and my email is always open, and you can always find me on Twitter.  Although I will admit, I am spending less time there. Again, more on that here in one week.

BONUS:  I’ll be joining my good friend Kelly Hungerford tomorrow at #SEMrushChat on Twitter to discuss matching your content creation to your marketing funnel.  Hope to see you there!

Get ready for another amazing #SEMrushChat! This Wednesday we are going to discuss how to build a #ContentMarketing funnel that works! ✏️

⭐ Special guests: @KDHungerford @MackCollier @TheRealSJR ⭐ pic.twitter.com/17TwufJW7d

— Semrush (@semrush) September 1, 2020