No Comments Pushback
Well, my decision to clean up my blog and organize my life by getting rid of comments seems to have pissed off a number of folk on Monday. I'm really not sure why they care so much, but they're all hopping mad. People always get so upset when I do something to remind them that this is my personal blog and not some public forum or service. But no matter how many times I repeat it, there's a core set of people out there who just don't seem to get it.
The pushback was varied, though with a common thread that I'm generally a bad, selfish person who has perpetrated some ghastly crime against the blogosphere (and will rue the day).
Ben seems to think I'm not cluetrain enough, compares me to Dave Winer and says that I need to have comments turned on because other people don't want to break the "theme" of their blog. In response to Ben, Lee moans that he is less in touch with a Yahoo! employee now. Debbie just seems pissed off in general, but is outraged that I removed the previous comments on my site as well, and decides that it must be an evil plan to drive more links to my "black hole" of a weblog. And finally, this wack job is most annoyed of them all, and is up in arms because I may have broken some anchor links, and that by removing comments, it's a slap in the face to all my readers and a crime of history akin to burning books... And he swears he'll never ever ever remove your comments from his blog and can't wait to meet me in person to say this all to my face. Joy.
There's lots of irony in all this - everyone of course says it's my blog and I can do whatever I want with it, but then they all proceed to tell me how I should run it. Lee even starts his post with a disclaimer about his employer, yet lambasts me for not being a good company representative on my own personal weblog. Sooooo amusing! Speaking of being a good employee, I'm not sure what Debbie's problem is - I reached out to her a couple weeks or so ago via IM, wasn't able to connect and got a post about how I was "ignoring her" less than 24 hours later for my trouble, so I think she's got issues already. The last guy has just lost it completely - I'm wondering whether to get a restraining order (just kidding).
I guess this is all another day in the good ol' blogosphere. What these people don't get is that I wrote a post on my weblog, they read it and responded on their weblog, and now I'm responding to them again here. That's a conversation - no comments needed.
As for the previous comments, I got rid of them mostly because I was too lazy to put in the PHP logic into the WordPress template which would take out the Comment header at the bottom of the single.php page for future posts. I was like, "Eh, I'll just get rid of them all" and didn't think twice about it. But that's okay, as this is my site, I can make those types of arbitrary decisions. Now that the comments are gone (not deleted actually, just not displayed) I like it! The weblog is very clean and 100% mine again.
Anyways, as I've repeated from the very beginning in response to all sorts of criticism over the years, I will publish this weblog how I want, about what I want and you read if you want. That's it, very simple.
-Russ