As for policing comments, I feel the same way about the mass amounts of fluff comments. However, this really seems to be an issue specific to larger websites. I have a small blog and I most certainly don’t have this problem, but I frequent some larger websites where the comments often do contribute greatly to the content… it just takes a lot more work then it should to find those comments! On the other hand, sites like Reddit do a good job with comment quality and it may be because of the ranking system someone else mentioned.

I don’t think the solution is to eliminate comments. That stifles collaboration or makes it 1-1 instead of 1-many. Monitoring all comments can get too unwieldy on large sites. I don’t know yet if there is a good solution for this problem.

I delete comments pretty freely myself. Rude comments, absolutely, no question about it, gone. My theory is that if I wouldn’t let you say it in my living room I’m not letting you say it on my blog. And I’m not talking about swearing, I’m talking about general douche baggery.

But even more common are “Nice article!” comments, which are completely useless and also get deleted. Thanks, but in order to keep this discussion useful it needs to be readable.

I made a decision a while ago to disable comments from my website as I knew I was happy with how the information was being presented. And then if people felt they had some feedback that was relevant and critical to the article then they could contact me regarding the article via email.

I find it works fine that way.

I am not justifying this type of unnecessary banter, but if a blogger can’t take a few moments to correct grammatical errors in a blog post, how can we trust that they have reviewed the subject matter that they are discussing in their post?

They did a great job of replicating a typical “comments” section on some of the larger sites.

I police my site, but probably more for just things that look spammy. If you just say “Awesome!” and your website address is a company site or a spammy site, then I’ll remove it.

However, if it doesn’t look like you’re spamming and “Awesome!” seems to fit what I posted I’ll leave it. I mean sometimes “Awesome!” is a useful comment for someone trying to decide if what you have to say fits the bill. If I’ve posted some technique for fixing a problem, then perhaps that one word comment is useful to someone trying to decide if what I wrote is right for them.

But seriously, it is indeed annoying to have to skip through that kind of crap. I always prefer comment systems like HN’s, where comments can be down-voted and become progressively less contrasting as the score goes down. I read comments more often on sites that do that, and they seem to have a better sense of community to them, so I dare say that others do the same. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much you can do about internet warriors – by the time they’ve grown out of it they’ve been replaced by the next wave, ready to demonstrate just how clever they are to the world.

One site I used to visit (I forget which), used to edit annoying posts rather than delete them. “First!” posts would have the date edited so that they always appeared last, and the arrogant, rant-y posts had the line “…so in summary, this article annoys me because I feel unloved” added to the end. The joke got old pretty quickly, but the apoplectic rages and accompanying impotent threats from those who had it done to their comments never did

In my view anyone who posts ‘First!’ should be permanently banned from the internet because they clearly don’t have the maturity to make any contributions to community.

I generally tend not to delete comments on my own site. If a competitor or a know it all posted and slagged me off then it just shows more about their own personality than anything else. But that’s only my opinion!

In most cases I’ve found the vast majority of commenter’s to be quite friendly and encouraging as I’m sure you have too.

Keep up the great work and, um, “First!”…hehe I kid