I’ve written elsewhere about some of my thoughts on the recent redesign and changes at the Metroblogging network, but now that the site has been up and running for over a week I wanted to address one specific concern that I (and many others) voiced:
Requiring users to register to post comments effectively prevents not just comment spam, but also legitimate user participation.
When I wrote for Metblogs a couple years ago, on any given day we’d probably have a dozen or more comments roll in amongst the various posts. I don’t have any hard stats in front of me, but 50-100 comments per week was probably average, with hot topics increasing this number.
Today I was looking at the Portland Metblogs site and out of curiosity I counted the number of comments in the past week. That number is 3. Not three per day… three total comments in the last 7 days.
Going from 50-100 comments per week down to 3 is a huge drop. There’s a big chunk of folks that won’t register to comment, either because they’ve got a comment on their mind but it’s not worth the hassle to get it posted, or because (like me) they feel it’s an undue burden to participation and I don’t want to manage a username/password for hundreds of sites. There are plenty of anti-spam tools for blogs, and third-party authentication tools such as OpenID can provide some level of authentication without requiring Yet Another Registration Process for participants.
This isn’t just a philosophical debate. If you want folks to participate, don’t build walls. Look at the numbers.
[tags]blogging, comments, registration, walledgardens, metroblogging, metblogs[/tags]
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Ouch, that ought to hurt! I wonder how the other metros are faring. Probably the same.