COMMENTS!….Jacob Levy talks about evolution of the blogosphere:
I’m one of the last of the oldline blogluddists who thinks that the decline of civility and decency the blogosphere can be traced to two events, one of which I won’t tell you but one of which was the creation of comments sections. In particular, I remember thinking that the opening of comments at Kevin Drum’s then-site, CalPundit, changed things rather a lot.
This deserves explication. Does Jacob think that opening a comment section changed my actual blogging? Or did the blogging remain the same but the mere existence of raucous commenters changed things? If the latter, why not just ignore the comments? If the former, how?
I’ve heard this general complaint many times, and I’ve never really understood it. My own view of comments is that they don’t exist mainly for my benefit, or even for my readers’ benefit, but for my commenters’ benefit. In the same way that blogging gave me a platform to mouth off in public that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, I figure that comment sections give an entirely different group of people the same opportunity. So I’m happy to provide it, even if it often gets out of hand. It’s not like anyone’s holding a gun to our heads and forcing us to read them, after all. (And anyway, the comment section here has improved considerably over the past couple of years thanks to my steely and implacable moderators. Thanks guys!)
On a more general note, Jacob’s post reminds me that I’ve always been a little puzzled by the number of times readers have told me that I’ve “changed” thanks to something or other. When I opened comments. When I started accepting ads. When I moved to the Washington Monthly. When I moved to MoJo. Etc. For a variety of reasons, it’s unlikely in the extreme that any of these events changed anything about my writing at all, but people sure think they do with fair regularity. I don’t doubt that my writing has evolved since I started doing this six years ago, but I very much doubt that there was any particular event that’s been responsible for it. More likely it was just six years of writing and learning and getting progressively more annoyed with the modern Republican Party.
But let’s combine both these topics into one. Old timers: what do you say? Has my blogging changed substantially since the early days? How? Naturally, I urge you to leave your observations in comments.
UPDATE: Jacob responds.
