commenting on commenting

Matt Haughey has an interesting post on his blog about feeling like an "old man" of blogging, railing against the young whippersnappers and their commenting habits...

It’s tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I’m starting to think there’s this "new generation" that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you’d never say anything in a comment that you wouldn’t say to a friend’s face.

It's worth reading in its entirety, of course, and there's great stuff in the comments -- from a pitch-perfect "FIRST!" to cardhouse attributing it to lowered barriers to entry ("Weblogs are practically crotch-thrusted at you, and commenting is crazy simple.") And though I rambled on in my comment a bit (sorry, no comment permalinks on Matt's blog, unfortunately), I'll stick by my opener:

I used to get the best comments on my weblog hand-delivered to me over lunch. And you know what? I still do. (Plus, food!)

So if you have comments on this post, let me know and next time we're together I'll buy you lunch. I love lunch.

Comments

[Matt Haughey]

I'm wondering if more accountability could be achieved through tools that tracked all your comments across blogs, for both making comments feel more valuable by being easy to read and share with people that follow you (I left five comments today on four different sites, go check them out!) and maybe another benefit would be that maybe people would feel they had a reputation to uphold and apply some social pressure to not be an asshole?

(I used typekey so we should get some extra good food)

[Andrew Anker]

I'm resisting the temptation to leave either an obnoxious comment or one that says absolutely nothing.

But yes! Let's do lunch!

[Rory Marinich]

Yes. Let's do lunch. And, somewhere along the line, let's figure out just how to fix this problem.

[Larissa Gaston]

Although I'm relatively new to the blogging world, I guess I'm old school because I’m not into the snarky comments either – I think they’re annoying and just generally uncool, not to mention miss the whole point of commenting, which is relating and connecting. If I worked in the city I’d take you up on your lunch offer, but since I don’t I guess I’ll just continue using my lunch time to catch up on my blog reading - and making comments (the non-snarky kind of course). But I'm all for you guys going to lunch and figuring out how to fix the problem.:) P.S. I really like the idea of being able to view all someone's comments across all blogs.

[Michael Sippey]

@larissa -- if you're up in the city sometime, let me know. would love to buy you lunch.

[Larissa Gaston]

I might be up there next week - if it works out I'll let you know.:)