Reflections on moderated blog comments

Ran into another blog today with misleading, subjective assertions about topical content and which moderates all comments. It's made me realize that, if you intend to blog about current events with any integrity, you absolutely must unmoderate comments and be ready to fight the spam. Otherwise, you've risk starting a monolog, not a conversation, and the web has enough monologs.

At best, the practice of moderating comments on opinion pieces is ill-advised and inconsiderate; at worst, it's self-serving dishonesty — you should just turn off comments entirely so we all know it's really a monolog.

Comments

[Charles]

Spam isn't a huge problem if you have a decent captcha set up is it? Or are you advocating removing all barriers to posting and fighting spam the hard way?

[Charles]

And I find an answer with the captcha after I hit post, so question answered.

[Jim Meyer]

Heh. As you saw, I'm all for every bit of help I can get. I only mentioned fighting the spam as that's frequently the complaint against open comments.