Over the past year I’ve had my blog comments closed.
This baffles a lot of people.
After all, aren’t we in the age of Web 2.0 and social media where interaction and being “social” is the new business panacea? Where web visitors now expect (and in some ways demand) you have a blog so they can socialize and interact with you?
Maybe.
And I probably AM missing out on sales, profits and other long term benefits by turning comments off.
But in this case it’s all about balance.
Specifically, balancing out my time.
Most of my income is from freelance copywriting assignments and a couple other ventures I’ve got my fingers in.
My site is just a small “cog” in the machine.
And unfortunately, there were just too many jackanapes trying to goose in comments sucking up my time.
Some tried plugging their crap on my site.
And others simply had a bad case of “diarrhea of the keyboard” — where they’d start ranting, cussing, tearing down other commenters, etc. One blue flame special — who I call the “seething email” guy — would try posting multi page political rants that made no sense whatsoever (in giant block paragraphs that were impossible to read without going blind), and then whine about how I was “censoring” him because the spam filter zapped his (obviously inappropriate) comments.
Dumb.
Anyhoo, if I had more time, I’d still entertain this stuff.
Because in a lot of ways it IS entertaining.
But the whole moderating thing is just too time consuming.
But, who knows?
Mayhaps one day I’ll fire the comments section back up. In the meantime, if you want to comment on a blog post/email, all you have to do is go to my FaceBook page:
All posts automatically show there by day’s end.
And it’s easy to comment on them if you want.
See?
I’m not a total social media “luddite” after all…
Ben Settle
