Beattie goes nursery school, not “old school” |
It’s every blogger’s choice whether or not they want to enable comments, which means Russell Beattie is well within his right whether or not he wants to enable/disable comments on his blog.
He had comments enabled for quite some time and even said he valued some of the comments but in a recent move he claims to be going “old school” over his new comment policy (emphasis mine):
I just took out the comments on my blog. All of the old ones, and no more new ones. All gone bye bye. Yep, I’m going old school - just my thoughts on my site alone. I’ve had comments enabled for years now, so it’s really a big change. But it’s something that needed to be done.
Where did this ever become “old school”? I’ve been on the web for 10+ years, and this seems more like a slap in the face of his readers — some of them longtime readers — removing every one of their old comments. Not to mention this breaks links and context on the web for those who linked to comments. Yeah, there are caches out there, but the original source has been altered for no good reason other than … because the author felt it wasn’t that important?
How can one trust linking to anything Beattie is responsible for going forward? What’s next, will he start killing his old posts because he doesn’t think they are important any more either? He’s put himself in league with newspapers using dynamic linking practices.
Beattie goes on to explain how busy he is and the time spent refreshing comments wasn’t worth the return any more. Keep in mind this is the same guy who said he was making three times the amount with YPN contextual ads over Adsense. I wonder how much of that money was a result of the value of comments? Or will he claim that all his ad clickers came from the search engines and not his regular readers? I’ve seen that mentioned and maybe that’s true but since the comments were part of his posts, they were part of the SE juice. He just ripped out a major artery of content.
Just ripped out that past value and time spent by others and tried to make it sound like he was doing something cool? Strange.
I will make this promise here and now that as long as I have anything to do with this blog: I will never, ever, ever, ever delete all your past comments. This is my web space that I’m paying for, but any comment you leave that isn’t spam or BS and makes it to the post pages — and thus becomes part of the search engine spidering — and ultimately a valuable part of this website. I may go temporarily insane at some point in the future — as it seems like Beattie might be doing here — and change my position on the value of reader comments and a two-way communication channel, but I will not ever violate and remove the past unless legally instructed to do so.
Sadly, Beattie isn’t removing all the past comments for legal reasons, he’s removing them because he wanted to do so.
I think this will be a move he will regret at some point in the future from a traffic and financial perspective. Time will tell.
There are backups in place here and as I’ve written before: I see the comments as more valuable than some of my posts! How can any blogger tell their readers: you know what, not only am I too busy to read you keeping me honest (and that’s what readers/commenters tend to do), I’m going to eradicate anything you ever said here.
What a jackass.
If Beattie and I should ever meet, and we just might you never know because we travel in some similar circles, I’ll be more than happy to tell him everything I’ve written here to his face and then maybe he’ll feel compelled to explain (or tell me back off to my face) how he can justify such an extreme reaction as this? How is his precious time worth so much more than all his readers comments?
I don’t care how good, bad, useless, useful, etc Beattie’s content is heretofore, I’m done reading him. Anybody who would treat their readers like this doesn’t deserve having any. I’d rather promote the blogger who values and respects his/her readers.
Again, and hopefully this point isn’t lost: it is totally cool if Beattie — or any other blogger — wants to turn off comments but where things get derailed is deleting all comments ever made. That is akin to giving the middle finger to everybody who has ever taken time out of their lives to leave comments. We’re not all spamming shitbags out here, Mr. Beattie! I wonder — not — what he’ll do for his next “old school” act? Burn some books?
Screw you, Russell Beattie. And for anybody else who treats their readers this way: screw them too.
Update 2/7/2006 7:22am PST: Time to see how many of Russell Beattie’s readers who are also bloggers have spoken and tally the votes. By my count he’s 0 (for)-4 (against)-1 (neutral). Let me recount (incomplete list below).
Everton “respects his wishes” but won’t ever do it on his blog, adding: “For me, a blog isn’t a blog without it being shared with other people, and accepting comments.” Neutral.
Ben Metcalfe is weighing in too. remember he’s the guy who stood up and spoke against Mena Trott calling for civility on the internet. There’s no Twilight Zone twist, of course he doesn’t care for this either, saying it is “really sad.” Against.
Debi aka Mobile Jones titles her post Antisocial Media and says: “Like Ben, I’d encourage Russ to restore his past comments merely as a courtesy to those who relied upon the existence of those comments and links to extend the conversation.” Against.
Good to know Beattie is keeping this nursery school. His best response — apparently he doesn’t realize I have a name — is to refer to me as as “whack job” and claim I’ve “totally lost it.” Bingo on the last one — I have totally lost any links made to prior comments on his blog, but then he says he is too lazy to edit his Wordpress single template so comments on new posts won’t show. You know what, I’m not lazy at all, and will now prove it.
Here is how ridiculously easy — this took me only 60 seconds to code — the amount of time it would take for him to stop displaying all new comments and show the past, hidden comments. Have at this code, Russell, I’ve done the heavy lifting for you:
In single.php replace:
With:
if ($post->ID < 1008787) {
comments_template(); // Get wp-comments.php template
}
?>
For those who care about the logic herein, since all WP posts are stored as incremental ID numbers in the database we can look at when Beattie said he no longer wanted comments (ID# 1008787) and just show comments in the template on posts before (< ) that ID number.
As for turning off new comments he can go to his admin area and uncheck a box that says he doesn’t want to accept comments on his blog. This is a two minute fix. Two minutes of Beattie’s time. Now he has no more excuses, even laziness. Unless he is too lazy to copy/paste too. Can’t help him there.
Did this post make you go hmm?
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This would really piss me off if I had made a number of comments on his posts, and especially if I had created links to them. It pisses me off anyway, just on principle, even though I never visited his site until I read your post (sorry for your unintended traffic promotion). I don’t think I’ll be going back there, though. I really don’t follow his logic on this, either. Can’t he figure out how to get automatic notifications about new comments on his posts, instead of “obsessively checking my comments over the next day or so”?
Comment by SterlingCamden — February 6, 2006 @ 5:56 pm PST
Seems like Beattie would benefit from a tool like coComment, doesn’t it, Sterling? Unless you are big into mobile phones you really haven’t been missing much. (I realized I’d be sending him some traffic and juice, but I want people to go there and try and figure this out because I sure can’t).
I’ve linked to him a few times in the past (do a search on “beattie” in the search if you are really curious and I’ve mentioned specific comments on his blog too and now I’m at the same quagmire I have with newspapers. Do I go back through the old content and add: “removed content” or just leave it broken.
I predict this will become a much, much bigger problem for search engines as time goes on — and publishers too — because it breaks the spokes in the wheels. If someone links to say a comment by you and that link is cut off, I’ve essentially redirected the content that was intended to be linked.
Maybe I should be investing in content caching companies going forward … hmm.
Comment by TDavid — February 6, 2006 @ 6:24 pm PST
oooh, there’s an idea: a global permalink repository. Wonder what kind of legal ramifications that would face?
Comment by SterlingCamden — February 6, 2006 @ 6:32 pm PST
I disagree. The contents of a blog are owned by the person who owns the blog. There’s no obligation to anyone else to avoid editing or deleting something after its published. That also applies to comments, which exist at the pleasure of the blog owner, as they should.
Comment by billg — February 6, 2006 @ 7:38 pm PST
Of course the contents are owned by the person who owns the blog, billg. “Exists at the pleasure of the blog owner” seems pretty telling. But what about the other blog owners who have linked to specific comments? Are you saying they don’t matter at all?
Aye, there’s the rub.
What about the impact of the search engines, what is your take on that? Or do you not care that stuff you might link to — or read that others have linked to — would lose context because you can’t go there and see the entire words, not just the snipped quote?
Comment by TDavid — February 6, 2006 @ 7:47 pm PST
You seriously need to chill out.
Comment by anon — February 7, 2006 @ 4:55 am PST
Maybe at last people will realize that Russell Beattie not only is mentally retarded (low IQ) but that he is also a vile, evil person. He published lies and libel about me for example and this move with comments just confirms my theory that he is too mentally retarded to handle other people’s arguments…
Comment by Comic Strip Blogger — February 7, 2006 @ 6:48 am PST
Nope, the other bloggers who have linked to specific comments don’t count. No one has any reason to assume that anything they link to is permanent. There’s no reason to assume that anything on the net is permanent. That includes search engines.
If it isn’t under your control, how can you count on it being there?
Sites are taken down and content edited and deleted every second. If something you’ve linked to goes away, yes, that’s annoying. A crisis? No. The result of someone’s presumed obligation to never, ever touch anything once it is posted? No, that obligation isn’t there.
Comment by billg — February 7, 2006 @ 9:31 am PST
billg - sites like WikiPedia which form great context from linking to other websites would definitely suffer. The problem I see is if people cannot rely on a source changing/deleting content that source is going to have a tough road getting any traction.
Mr. Beattie claims he chose not to display the past comments because he was too “lazy” to make the change in his WP templates.
I took the *minute* of time required to write the code that he — or anybody else — would need to insert into their WP single.php template in order to display past comments and provided instructions for how to stop future comments in the post section above as an addendum.
Comment by TDavid — February 7, 2006 @ 11:41 am PST
Is a blog without comments still a blog?
Blogger and Yahoo employee Russell Beattie has been taking a fair bit of flack for removing comments from his blog - and seems more than a little defensive about it, from what I can see. Fair enough. As he points out, it’s his blog and he can ru…
Trackback by mathewingram.com/work — February 7, 2006 @ 12:58 pm PST
Hilariously good coding there, TDavid. Billg is right — it’s Russell’s blog and he can do what he wants with it. And I can shoot people who come onto my property without my permission, too, but I’m usually more civil than that. be-AT-ee’s incivility insured that I’ll never be one of his readers.
Comment by SterlingCamden — February 7, 2006 @ 1:02 pm PST
Ohhhh poor babies. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. Life just isn’t worth living anymore. With my comments gone it’s like I never really existed in the first place. I’m gonna go sit outside and eat some worms.
Comment by jcmulle — February 7, 2006 @ 5:35 pm PST
If you think your comments are so useless, jcmulle, then why post them?
Comment by Sterling Camden — February 7, 2006 @ 8:08 pm PST
I would have liked to tell him my opinion, but he has his comments turned off. I would rel=nofollow the goof in the future.
Comment by orangecrush — February 7, 2006 @ 9:12 pm PST
So if you are counting votes (why?) count mine in the Beattie column. I read his blog only once in a great while and I have never before been to your site but reading your post I have to say, you come off like a whack job.
Deleting all comments ever made is like “giving the middle finger to everybody who has ever taken time out of their lives to leave comments”? If you want to control the longevity of what you write, do it on your own blog.
Comment by Ilya — February 7, 2006 @ 9:31 pm PST
iLya - you don’t seem to read very closely. It’s not about controlling the longevity of what *I* write, it’s about the conversations of many different people and allowing readers to clickthru and check the context, so they aren’t lost.
And as I see it here, I’m the only one to offer Beattie any sort of real technical solution to this, so if that makes me a whack job in your or his world, then guilty as charged. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. In order to get counted above though you need to use a real URL or email address from a blog, none of which you provided, so you are just an anon or one of Beattie’s relatives for all we know.
Comment by TDavid — February 7, 2006 @ 10:22 pm PST
How bizarre for some members of the blogging community to get so precious over messages they’ve left as if they’re important works of social comment to be preserved for the good of humanity. Surely the thing that makes the web different from past media is that it’s not permanently carved in stone - it’s all fluid electrons that continue to shift, that reflect a national zeitgeist, and morph accordingly . Comments even a month old are already growing moss.
I run a blog with 3000 posts and over half a million visitors a month, and frankly, on the day I get bored with it, I’ll hit the delete key and wave goodbye. And the world will keep turning.
Comment by Steve — February 7, 2006 @ 11:52 pm PST
Hello Steve, thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts. Doubtful that they will grow moss here.
I actually am part of, though tardy as of late, and contribute to a seasoned blog that does 30,000+ uniques a day. Those readers are very passionate about the comments and heck there are still comments coming in many months after the fact on some posts. The other day somebody resurrected one of my articles over there from 2003 and was commenting on it. Take those folks’s comments away for even an hour and there will be a firestorm brewing.
Earlier tonight somebody left an informative comment on an older post here from July 2005. I’m still getting feedback on posts made in the first part of 2005. You see, it’s all new to some people in the search engines. They don’t see moss, they see it as fresh and new. If you want to talk morphing and zeitgeist and fluid electrons, then there is little more revealing than watching search activity on a daily basis.
So maybe moss grows on some, or many or all of your blog comments but that certainly isn’t indicative of all blogs, nor is it my experience here and at many other blogs, tiny, small, big and large. It would be interesting to poll how many of your readers would bother leaving comments if they knew your attitude was as described above. Maybe they don’t care, I don’t know.
Why should anybody bother leaving comments on something so volatile that it could go down tomorrow. That seems like wasted time when we all have so little of this on earth as it is?
Comment by TDavid — February 8, 2006 @ 12:58 am PST
Russell is a celebrity, maybe he doesn’t need bodyguards, but his blog does need them!
To effectively manage comments to his blog, he cannot rely on antispam tools, he needs a reputation system to assess how cool is this bold reader that dare sending a comment to his venerable blog.
This is basically what we are trying to obtain with our proposal of a reputation system for blog comments. There are lengthy posts about it on the Clipperz blog, http:///www.clipperz.net.
See the latest revision.
To test this proposal we are planning to:
- design an API for the reputation managers;
- implement a functional and free reputation manager service at clipperz.com (the site will go live shortly)
- (trying to) implement reputation modules for a couple of leading blogging platforms (with a lot of help from their communities)
Anyone interested?
Comment by Marco Barulli — February 8, 2006 @ 4:46 am PST
If people didn’t care about the comments they left on sites, then coComment would have no market. Obviously, it does, and (at least some) people do.
Comment by Sterling Camden — February 8, 2006 @ 12:48 pm PST
[…] Of course this blog is just a very, very, very tiny microcosm, but readers sometimes mention things here which strike a chord with me. This feeds into some of why I was upset that another blogger would carelessly want to rip out all his prior comments as if they were weeds instead of roses. Beauty is in the eye of the … […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Are we over-infatuated with Google? — February 8, 2006 @ 1:41 pm PST
Marco when I first read your post I had major doubts — frankly because it seemed unrelated and a bit spammy, sorry — but then I looked at what you are doing over there and my opinion changed a little bit. What you are working on could be interesting *if* you can get enough people to use it (adoption seems like the major roadblock). I’m curious to see where you go with this project. Another thing I’m a bit skeptical on is the part where people who refuse comments might (must?) need to enter in their feedback?
Just speaking for myself but no way will I be entering ebay style feedback on the vast majority of comments that aren’t approved. This post alone has had over 100 comments that haven’t been approved (spam) and on a daily basis this blog received hundreds of spam comments. They are filtered with various tools, but we still manually check many (not all) of them for false positives.
To tie this back into Mr. Beattie, I can see why he might have wanted to shut down future comments — and I support his decision in that regard — but I’ll likely never agree or understand why he thought so little of his many past comments. Folks who oppose this point of view are welcome to keep trying. It’s possible I’m missing something and while it might seem like I have a totally closed mind, I don’t. I’m willing to read, listen and reflect on contrarian points of view.
Comment by TDavid — February 8, 2006 @ 2:00 pm PST
Breaking links is certainly bad for the mojo. And while I enjoyed the picture above, I think the message that it presents is a bit harsh. If Mr. Beattie wants his site to suck, let it be.
Comment by Scott Johnson — February 8, 2006 @ 5:47 pm PST
What do you expect from a guy that works for a company is responsible for putting Chinese dissidents in jail.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060209-6150.html
Shame on you Russell!
Comment by AnonymousCoward — February 9, 2006 @ 5:37 pm PST
Nice picture (worth a thousand words indeed).
Comment by Jon — February 9, 2006 @ 7:30 pm PST
[…] Let me add ‘wack job’ to Shelley’s list, which is the label one popular blogger chose recently for me (now proudly a former reader) because he didn’t like my flames over nuking all his past comments, but to his credit at least he linked me in as part of the conversation. Nevermind that I was the only person (that I saw anyway, I’m sure somebody else somewhere offered help) who ultimately gave the guy a two minute one line code technical solution to the whole mess — which he has still ignored to date. Just because people disagree agree with you doesn’t mean they are any of the labels Shelley or I mentioned. In fact, I think when someone tries to sink in a debate to namecalling or stereotyping, it weakens their position severely. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Begging vs. earning links vs. white male tech gatekeeper snobs — February 13, 2006 @ 12:00 pm PST
I understand the right of the blogger to remove comments. However, what does it mean when you reply to a blog on USA Today ON Deadline
(about Google and the government wanting to collect our search records indiscriminately hoping to catch some who contact pornography
sites.) and the complete article disappears from the site? Almost immediately.poof! The article was gone from the page. Where did it go?
Comment by Lana — February 18, 2006 @ 8:35 pm PST
Nathan, I just noticed in cocomment that you left this comment here on 2/8:
> Nathan_Weinberg as Nathan Weinberg:
> T, did you see that Russel called you a “wack job”?
Not sure why that comment never made it here, but just wanted to let you know that I saw it and posted it here. I wonder why it never showed up? You seen that happen with any other comments you’ve left elsewhere?
Comment by TDavid — March 1, 2006 @ 5:30 pm PST
Beattie deleted the feedback to his own blog. People rewrite history all the time. How well they succeed depends on how well the people
living thru events remember the facts. Interpretation adds a lot, good and bad, but it can only go so far. By wanting to discard comments
he created a new topic, which drew me in. Now, does his rejection count as rejection of the reputations of the people who contributed to
his blog, or did he reject part of himself? It definitely did not destroy anyone’s identity. But did he clean his house too well?
Some think he might have second thoughts, some think he will come out unscathed. Is it necessary to keep repeating his name?
Remember, that the novel Roots had the seed of oral history to help it blossom.
Comment by Lana — March 2, 2006 @ 9:11 pm PST
Fitting that this post keeps getting more and more comments…oops, there goes another one.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 2, 2006 @ 9:21 pm PST
[…] Absolutely no surprise or doubt from me on either count. The next time somebody closes their comments and nukes all the past comments, it might be a darn good signal they are out of gas both figuratively and literally. Certainly enough for this reader to eject. A mere couple months ahead of the other former readers Mr. Beattie is now encouraging to unsubscribe. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » From no comments to no blog — April 24, 2006 @ 10:13 am PST
C’mon it really isn’t that bad. The web is a dynamic super group of entities that always changes. Old content that doesn’t change soon gets flushed. If you are worried about your links that don’t point to comments that were made previously then you will have to change your text so that you get the links right. Its just a normal part of being a net citizen that we all are.
Comment by Read the Comment Rules about Names — August 21, 2008 @ 2:33 pm PST