Two of My Pet Peeves

September 25, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

  1. Blogs that don’t allow comments.
  2. Blogs which remove comments (real comments, not spam or abuse).

I’m periodically deleting blogs in category 1 from my blogroll. Sadly, I’m discovering more and more in category 2.

Comments

Comment from Tom Duff
Time 9/25/2006 at 2:32 pm

I don’t understand. Some of the weblogs I like best, like Language Log and boing boing, don’t allow comments. OTOH, the comments are pretty much the total point of Lambda, the Ultimate.

Comment from Mark
Time 9/25/2006 at 3:19 pm

I suppose I view blogging as an attempt to engage people in conversation, rather than pontificate. I submit for your consideration: Intelligent Design: The Future, a blog nominally dedicated to promoting the idea of intelligent design as science. Really, all it consists of is snarky wordplay designed to denigrate scientists and their valuable work they give to society.

As a concrete example, consider this terrible article by regular contributor Cornelius Hunter. The only positive claim that it makes is a complete laugher:

Genes are found across a wide spectrum of species, but the gene sequences are too different to have an evolutionary relationship except in a few groupings within the spectrum of species.

Such a statement is so obviously wrong that I really don’t need to look at the paper cited (PDF here) to know that Hunter is just making up the conclusion that he’s making, but when you do look there, you find precisely that. Yeager, Kumar and Hughes do not conclude that gene sequences are too different to have an evolutionary relationship: Hunter made that up. The reason that they don’t allow comments is simple: they simply don’t want to be revealed as unable to support the position that they espouse.

On the other hand, Pharyngula and The Panda’s Thumb do allow comments. They put their ideas and logic up for commentary and criticism, and the reader is the beneficiary.

In any case, this post was really just a knee jerk reaction the deletion of a post I made on someone’s blog. It isn’t actually a rule which I apply consistently to what I read, but rather just a reflection of what I think is important about blogging.