Is Twitter Replacing Blog Comments?

October 28, 2013

I just turned off comments on my blog. There are many reasons, but I think they’re best summarized by Matt Gemmell. Here are his big ones:

  • Relatively little interaction these days

  • High burden on the blogger

I’ll add three more:

  • It slows the site down

  • Much interaction is spam

  • Twitter is better

I’d like to focus on that last one. Why is Twitter better? A few reasons, in my view:

  1. It’s easier to loop people in via the “@” convention

  2. It provides more interaction because Twitter that’s what Twitter excels at

  3. Twitter is more mobile friendly

I’m curious to hear what others think. Have you disabled blog comments? Do you still find them useful? Do you also see the trend moving towards Twitter interactions?

[ EDIT: Some good points have been brought up via Twitter and email. Some downsides include 1) not having a historical record of comments (unless you do an update like this one), 2) having fragmented comments on Twitter, and 3) causing annoyance with a blast of @replies on Twitter. All good points. ]

Related posts: