Robert Scoble’s blog post this week on Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Has Failed You made for interesting reading. He makes a lot of good points - definitely worth thinking about, whether you’re a tech blogger or, really, just a blogger of any kind - but it’s his analysis of what’s gone wrong with commenting on blogs that really resonated with me most:

Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.

What does this mean? Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. I’m so tired of those kinds of conversations “Scoble, you’re an idiot.” Hey, I already know that, remember my conversation with Jurvetson and Williams? Why can’t commenters be nice, the way they probably would be if they were face to face? That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.

As if to bear out his point, David Edelstein blogged at NY Magazine about the online reaction to his less-than-entirely-positive review of The Dark Knight. It’s easy to say that he should just ignore the comments entirely; after all, he’s a professional film critic and the commenters hadn’t even seen the film, so their personal attacks on him had very little grounding in reality. But obviously he couldn’t just ignore them - Edelstein felt the need to reply, to justify himself. And I really can’t blame him; I’ve been there myself (albeit on a much smaller scale!). After the initial indignation and urge to defend my opinion, I eventually had to just let it go and accept that writing anything on the Internet invites criticism. While that can be useful - and obviously I’m not saying all criticism is ungrounded - it’s important to be able to separate that which is actually justified from, well, abuse.

Eventually, you just have to accept that if someone is ranting and raving about what a complete idiot you are and how you should be banned from writing anything ever again, they’re unlikely to change their mind - but you also don’t have to care. (Unless they’re your editor, in which case, er, you probably will have to.)

But what does it mean for the Internet, and for Web 2.0, if virtually all discussions of anything online get derailed? If all comment sections become places anyone with any sense wouldn’t dare to tread - and writers are afraid of writing anything even remotely contentious for fear of the reaction? If we’ve failed by letting things get to this point, how do we rectify that?

I wish I had an answer.