Building Comment Participation Walls Ends Participation

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.