smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

One of the greatest joys in disabling comments, is an immediate and somewhat blunt end to spam.

I no longer have to concern myself with cleaning up the mess left by others, scrubbing away textual graffiti that wastes time and money, in the form of wanton bandwidth waste.

It’s bad enough the would-be viagra and porn magnates have to confront us with their wares, the insult is that they pay absolutely nothing for the storage and dissemination of their content, then take to insulting those who stand against them.

Case in point? Tumblr rocks, because there is no comment system, with a zero-tolerance stance against spam¹. Instead, it strongly promotes a community where people respond via their own tumblr presence.

It’s a simple system, that works amazingly well — so well in fact, that it’s often the benchmark for other like-minded ideas. You know there is something special happening when you become a benchmark, just as Twitter has.

Whilst others offer more features, twitter still does the one-single-thing remarkably well. It tracks what everyone is doing. Just.. what they are doing. Nothing more. And it works, because it’s such a simple premise, that anyone can grasp.

And it’s these wonderful new ways to communicate, via Tumblr to express and Twitter to respond, that the very way we engage on a daily basis, is changing at a fundamental level. We are all connected in an increasingly real-time fashion and have the opportunity to build, and continuing building communities, that defy many traditional or physical borders.

I know what many of you are doing, right now. I read your thoughts via your blog or tumble log, I see your Twitter or Pounce updates — and I am, whether I realise or not, part of a wider community as a result. A community that is increasingly moving towards platforms that simply do not allow for spam, or those whom perpetrate it.

And there is something to be said for the simpler approach. I have well and truly lost interest in facebook, because it tries to do so very much, that the entire point of it’s existence is somehow lost in all the noise. Sometimes, a simpler system has so many greater advantages.

We can make life difficult and cumbersome, by trying to have two way communication via a blogging platform, that is far more suited to dissemination of information, than discussion.. or, we can simplify life, using comment-less blogging to inform and real-time tools such as collaborative IM, twitter and pounce to fire debate.

Going comment free isn’t about disengaging or silencing the critics, rather, it inspires discussion and debate, by shifting the form of discussion to the right kinds of platforms, where spam cannot thrive and people can engage on a more community orientated level.

1. .. a lesson blogspot could well learn (↩)