In My Day, Comments Sections Were For Shit

One other thing I've been thinking about a bit. It's not exactly a problem on this blog, but on popular blogs there's a real problem with too many comments. In a sense I suppose it might not be a problem, but here's my point.

If I see that there are dozens of comments, or even 20, I'm very unlikely to read any of them. It's just not worth reading all the moronic ones to reach the few good ones. On top of this, people use comments sections in really crazy ways. Sometimes you have people post things like, "First!" for the first comment, with nothing more. Other times you effectively have 2 or 3 people going back and forth in a debate that is almost always worthless. As the comments pile up, new commenters haven't read the old comments, and you get a lot of repetition.

It becomes a selection problem - the only people with time to read the comments are very much the opposite of the kind of people who have useful things to say. As bad as most blogs are, the real madness emerges in the comments sections.

One solution, by the way, is to either patrol the section yourself (impractical) or allow users to "rate" comments and then push highly rated comments to the top. This destroys chronology, though, and makes the comments into an indecipherable mess.

Anyway, I'm sure there's a smart way to do it, but I haven't seen it yet. As it is it's deeply frustrating to deal with comments at all, except on smaller blogs where the comments are mostly reasonable.

[UPDATE: having read through the comments on the crazy Yglesias post about the morality of deficits, I see that several commenters made exactly my point. This is typical, though. There are often good comments interspersed among the crazies. This is precisely why it's a shame that comments sections are overrun with crazies.]