Comments and Trackbacks

La Shawn Barber will be reworking her blog for the New Year. One of the things she is mulling over is whether to have comments and trackbacks on the reworked blog.

For those that aren't bloggers, comments can be a pain if people want to be asshats. You end up having to moderate them and that takes time you really would rather spend on something else. Chances are if I ever get sufficiently popular comments will be going bye-bye here as well. Too much trouble for one person. I might switch to a robust threaded system with moderation points like Scoop or Slash instead, but the likelihood of me wanting to put that much effort into the blog is low.

Trackbacks are a different matter though. Very few people are willing to be total asshats on their own blogs. Plus most of the people I know personally that leave comments on my blog have their own blog or online diary. Folks, it ain't that hard to manually send a trackback ping via Haloscan. If anything going trackbacks only might force people to link to me and improve my Ecosystem ratings.

I also think that some level of ideological checks and balances are necessary to keep the blogosphere running properly. This way if someone disagrees with me or I'm wrong about something, you can go straight to their post from mine. This is what has the potential to make blogs much more accurate than standard journalists. Instant fact checking and the like.

I have also noticed that a lot of the top conservative/libertarian blogs don't have trackback or comments. Some of the top liberal blogs do and liberal blogs seem to be growing better than conservative ones. This may be because liberals flame conservatives more, but in any case I believe we conservatives may be stunting our ideological growth here.