Blogs Without Comments

As even casual readers of this blog know, my posts are often met with pointed, even nasty, criticism.  I may not like or agree with the comments I receive, and I don't always choose to respond to them, but I read every one.  Indeed, I think bloggers have an ethical obligation to read comments to their posts -- if they believe their opinions are worth sharing with the world, the least they can do is consider what the world thinks of those opinions. 

Which is why blogs that do not allow comments, or only selectively allow them, irritate me.  Case in point: the Volokh Conspiracy, a very influential legal blog.  With the exception of Orin Kerr and Eugene Volokh himself, the law professors who post at VC almost never enable the comment function.  Fair enough: if they're more interested in proselytizing than debate, that's their right. 

But the lack of comments on blogs like VC also comes with a price: decreased factual accuracy.  In addition to enouraging dialogue, comments serve an essential error-correction function: if a blogger makes a factual error, an astute reader will call him on it.   Without comments, the error goes uncorrected and may well -- given the incestuous world of the blogosphere -- be repeated so often on other blogs that it starts to be accepted as true.

So it is, for example, with a recent post on VC by Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason, concerning student opposition to a speech code at the University of Alabama.  In offering support for the students, Zywicki says -- citing a blog maintained by FIRE, the far-right Foundation for Individual Rights in Education -- that

this is not the first time that Alabama's students have stood up to bullying by their Administrators, who once tried to prohibit the display of American flags on campus. (emphasis mine)

One problem: that statement is completely false.  As Kevin Drum at The Political Animal points out, the FIRE blog says something quite different:

This is, after all, the school that banned the American flag from dorm windows.

"Dorm windows" vs. "on campus" --  Zywicki was either unconscionably sloppy or willing to deliberately mislead his readership in order to make a political point.

To make matters worse, FIRE's post was no more accurate than Zywicki's.  As Kevin Drum discovered when he clicked on FIRE's link, what really happened was that Alabama actually banned all window displays in student dormitories in response to a confederate flag being displayed in a dorm window:

After months of experimenting with different methods of restricting speech, the administration of the University of Alabama (UA) has "indefinitely" tabled a policy outlawing all window displays in student dormitories. The policy was issued after a student was ordered to remove a confederate flag from the door of his dorm room. Other students, aware of the threat to their liberty posed by this regulation, subsequently displayed American flags to challenge administrators to enforce the ban.

Alabama's response was, in my opinion, completely misguided.  As I've said before, I'm unequivocally opposed to campus speech codes.  But there is a fundamental difference between banning all window displays in dorm windows and only banning American flags -- and to pretend there's not is, again, either indefensibly sloppy or intellectually dishonest.

Now, I'm more than willing to give Zywicki the benefit of the doubt and assume it was an honest mistake.  But that just indicates how important it is for blogs to allow comments.  If Zywicki had wanted to discuss the issue of speech codes instead of preach about them, he almost certainly wouldn't have made such an embarrassing mistake.

Comments

[A. Rickey]

OK, here's a defense of no comments you may not have thought of: bandwidth.

The VC's conspiracy is an order of magnitude higher than mine or yours--at least. Depending on how they have comments set up, this may require a rebuild of a great deal of the site each time a user comments. (I know this causes significant problems on some blogs.) That, in turn can get quite burdensome. In the meantime, the VC does enable Trackbacking, so that if you have your own blog--and hey, they're not expensive--you can benefit from some of their traffic if you wish to address their issues.

So, for instance, if you wanted to make sure your post was addressed, you should be able to send a trackback ping to them. Most authors watch their pings rather carefully, and often respond if they feel like it.

To boot, each of the VC entries will easily link you to Technorati, which after a few days will show you most of the other blogs that have linked to that entry. Give it some time, and you'll show up on that link whether you want to or not.

Blogs allow multiple ways of facilitating communication, and different blogs will choose different ones based upon a number of factors: the features the blog supports, how they work, hosting costs, the blog owner's or owners' preferred methods of communication...

To say posts on VC aren't adequately discussed in the blogosphere is a very difficult statement to make, and I'd not want to play the "blogs should have this feature, or they're not adding to the debate" game. The VC, for instance, has searchable archives. (I really hate Picosearch, but hey, they've implemented it.) Do you?

[Mike]

In offering support for the students, Zywicki says -- citing a blog maintained by FIRE, the far-right Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Oh, indeed! That's why one of its founders was a former bit shot with the ACLU, and also why nadine Strossen endorses FIRE's guide to free speech on campus.

Just becase they support the right of conservatives to offend (just liberals defend Churchill's right to offend) hardly makes them a far-right group.

[Mike]

In addition to enouraging dialogue, comments serve an essential error-correction function: if a blogger makes a factual error, an astute reader will call him on it.

There are two solutions to this -- The reader can send an e-mail or another blogger will blog about the error. I suspect a left-leaner would be giddy to find someone at the VC commit a gaffe, and other left-leaners would gladly link to that post. So I'm not sure your accuracy criticism is persuasive.

I love having comments at my blog, but if I had 50 - 75 comments per post, it would overwhelm me, and I would disable comments.

[Joey]

If the VC had comments, they probably would get hundreds for each post. The comments would quickly become not worth reading. Just check out the number and quality of comments at left2right:

http://left2right.typepad.com/

[Kevin Jon Heller]

A. Rickey's point is a good one, and well-taken, although I imagine the professoriat at VC could afford the extra bandwidth.

I'm less convinced by Joey's point. VC is an influential blog, but I'm guessing that it's legal focus means that it's nowhere near as widely read as a blog like Eschaton or Daily Kos. There can't be that many people out there interested in Todd Zywicki's impassioned attempts to protect credit-card companies from evil, rapacious customers and Dave Kopel's mindless ravings about firing Ward Churchill. Besides, VC has 16 different contributors, so the burden of skimming even dozens of comments per post would be negligible.

[A. Rickey]

Kevin:

You can get an idea of the scale of the VC from their place in the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. They're ranked 12th. That's pretty big.