The Daring Fireball Conversation Style

Of all the controversial things that John Gruber’s site has to offer, perhaps the most controversial thing about the blog itself is the commenting system, or lack thereof. He catches hell for it all the time from various people, and doesn’t mind throwing it right back at them every so often.

I won’t argue that it doesn’t have its advantages, or even that it’s preferable to not having a commenting system. However, I think it could still use some improvement.

The idea behind it, as Gruber mentioned in his aforementioned post, is “for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.” To have a “curated conversation,” Gruber instead offers his opinion about other articles, which are sometimes responses to his own. It’s actually relatively rare to see a post that isn’t about someone else’s article. Indeed, one can argue that his blog is all about conversation, just not in the way that we’re used to.

The main thing that this does is that it blocks out people who don’t have something to contribute to the conversation. No, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying that you love my article, or that you’ve come up with a hilarious joke about something that I just said. In fact, I love reading comments like that about things that I’ve written. For everyone else, though, they’re just irrelevancies that they have to trudge through to find really interesting points. Of course, flame posts also make their way to the site, and nothing good comes of those. If you let them through, people get sick of the comments because they become a sea of hatred and ridicule. If you moderate, then you have to read every single comment, and deal with the backlash from people you decide to silence. It’s a losing proposition either way.

The Gruber Theory, on the other hand, assumes that if you have something constructive to say, he will find it, and post it, and perhaps offer his return opinion. This is where the problems kick in:

1. Gruber can’t write about any article that he isn’t aware of,
2. Not every positive response is worth an article (and probably not worth an email either), and
3. Not everyone is a writer, not every writer is a blogger, and not every blogger is a short-form blogger.

With the first one, anyone who has a point to make regarding something Gruber talks about can post an article, and hope to God that he somehow stumbles upon it. Unfortunately, he can’t monitor the whole universe, so it all depends on a ton of luck, with a little bit of writing skill mixed in somewhere, for your article to end up in his RSS reader. You could send him an email directly, of course, but that leads into the second problem.

Maybe you want to say something about a topic that you know your readers won’t care about. You’re not going to write that. You could email it, but if it’s not worth a post to you, it might not be worth a post to him either, and personally I’ve been reluctant to email bloggers more popular than me simply because I think it would look like a vain attempt at grabbing attention. I could be wrong, though, so feel free to email me if you feel otherwise.

The last problem is that most people using the Internet are not bloggers. Maybe they have a point to make, but they won’t start a blog just so Gruber has something to link to. Others who do have websites write things besides opinions: maybe they write tutorials, reviews, or news. A comment, however, is something that anyone can leave without needing to have their own web presence. There are other people besides bloggers who have potentially valuable opinions.

I think Tumblr goes in the right direction with this. Any Tumblr user can reply through reblogging a post, and each reblogging sends a message to the original owner about who reblogged it, with a snippet of the post. This mostly solves the attention dilemma. Tumblr also has replies for when the response isn’t worth a full blown article, and messages for private responses.

The only issue is that users need a Tumblr account to do these things, and I know several friends who avoid replying simply because of that. I’m not quite sure how to cross that hurdle, but perhaps allowing Facebook or Twitter logins might make it more seamless.

The best solution may well be “Daring Fireball, now powered by Tumblr!” (EDIT: Actually, Daring Fireball with Tumblr integration would be more likely. But how would one go about playing nice with Tumblr like that?)