I'm stunned by the people who blog, but turn off trackbacks or comments. What is this medium about, if not the opportunity for anyone who reads your post to offer some reaction. That's what separates it from the guys who own the printing presses and deign to publish edited “Letters to the Editor.”

I don't want to be snarky. But it seems to me that a good portion of the folks who push “trackbacks are dead/comments are dead” memes are the people who have large audiences. Maybe many of them have forgotten that social media is social because listening is as important as talking.

I created a comment policy early on (after an incident with a troll leaving homophobic comments). I’m not super-popular and am really not striving to get there, but having a policy in place answers any questions and makes it clear I am not making up policy on the spot (n.b.: O.k., when I created the policy, it was rather on-the-spot and I was called out on it, but blogging was still fairly new). Yes, I am making judgments, but honestly, after implementing the policy I’ve never had to use it, and I won’t look quixotic if I do.

What Ryan and I have in common is intentionality. I remember reading a lot of woowoo stuff about “radical trust” a year or so back and (with my administrator’s cap on, as well as experience with online communities going back to 1990) thinking, that will not scale. YouTube cannot possibly enforce a comment policy at this point without looking ham-fisted and sending its users to Google Video or wherever.

But you can go into blogging with the idea that down the road, not every comment earns its right to be posted, and that “lively commentary” does not include enabling sociopathic behavior (which is what most of that vitriol is). I think that makes a difference no matter how big you do (or do not…) become.

That said, when I read blogs much bigger than my own, I’m frequently and consistently amazed at the level of discourse that has become the standard in comment areas. Read any Wired article to see what I mean – the most cretinous, uninformed, hate-filled dreck seems to become commonplace when a site reaches a certain level of mainstream popularity. In that respect, I completely empathize with people like Seth Godin, who refuse to allow comments.

From where I sit, having too many comments to manage is a nice problem to have and moderation is really not that hard. If you’re going to have a corporate blog, you have to understand that you may be subject to more scrutiny. It comes with the territory, and you have to plan from that from the beginning.