Commenting and Comments

In looking for the East Bay Mini-Makers Faire information, location, etc. for this weekend's event, I saw that they are hosted by Laughing Squid, a blog and a web-hosting co., which led me to check out what that co. was and to look into their blogging, just out of curiosity.

On one of their FAQ pages I saw the following, and you know I just had to add my two cents in here, as I too have noticed that the either decreasing amount of Comments to web stuff, or more importantly, the increasing unworthiness of comments to web stuff. Let's look at what the site said then I'll discuss:

1. Why are comments disabled on the blog? #
   We eventually reached the point that the most of our blog posts either had no comments at all or just a couple of comments. Overall the quality of the comments had been decreasing over the years to a point that the majority of the comments that people left were not adding any real value to the posts.
   Another thing that was happening is that feedback on our blog posts has been moving to outside services, like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. In fact on average we now get way more comments on our Google+ profile than we ever did when we had the blog comments turned on, and with Google+ the comments are higher quality, from more engaged commenters.
   Of course the amount comment spam we receive has only been increasing. Not just the kind of comment spam that can be easily caught with Akismet, but spam comments that looked legitimate, but were actually submitted in order to link to a spam website. It started taking a considerable amount of time each day dealing with sorting through comments to weed out the spam and approve legit comments.
   It’s not that we don’t value your input, in fact if you have any additional information regarding the content of a blog post (links, updates, corrections, etc.), please feel free to let us know. We will often add updates to posts as new information surfaces. 
   (BTW - This is from here).
   
   Where I think the change in comments and commenting on web sites, and I'm referring to articles, postings, etc., is any place that allows comments (except maybe academically-oriented blogs, but that may be because those blogs and sites are moderated?) - a very broad area.
   In any case, what particularly disturbed me is the public comments on, for instance, the sfgate.com site. OMG, and it's a general thing, not specific to any one article or areas of the site; I feel that people are just getting, well, more hateful and, imho, just plain 'ol more stupid!
   
   The lack of humanness, the overall negative tone, the funny at someone's else expensive postings,...it's all very disheartening. AND THEN, after the VP debate last night, I heard one of the news commentators on CNN (I think), say something about how big SuperPacs get together and over-post or completely hog the comments and tweets for there particular candidate or political perspective. OMG! Could that be true?! (Might I be so freaking naive?!) This is obviously some sort of rabbit hole for me because I have been thinking about this for a long time and I have an opinion on it, so lots more to discuss on this topic...