In the meanwhile heavy moderation of the comments in combination with a way for the site-moderator to block trolls from commenting is the only solution. Too bad far too many people turn into fuckwits when they’re under the impression of being anonymous.

I actually have a solution but I am not sharing as it is far to valuable :p

Nah only joking.

Look at what automattic have done with askismet and spam. Now if you took this idea and created a webservice that would track user feedback on each commenter the system could then filter out the nasty people. I could go on in detail like using http://www.readware.com/ for getting the tone of comment but I won’t…

However, surely the hateful idiots who abuse people would write to people who work for magazines if they didn’t have blogs.

Small blogs (IE: Blogs that don’t have this problem yet) should be solely monitored and controlled by a single person.

Large blogs almost become social networks in and of themselves. At that point you need to make it difficult to be a one time anonymous hater. The technology needs to become more complex as the community does.

Registration is generally hideously annoying, but if the site is really all that popular, the people who care _will_ register.

Registration and logging in before commenting on these large blogs also removes the anonymity to a degree, since you can’t be a whole new person for each comment you make.

Then add in some slashdot-esque karma system or even a digg-like simple page-based karma and it should all work out a lot nicer.

I’m sure there are places out there doing just that, how well has it worked for them? Know of anyone off the top of your head?

Ok, I guess Digg and slashdot are terrible examples of this kind of thing actually “working” but it all depends on the class of visitors I suppose.

Many people running a blog just don’t have the time to clean up and control the quality of comments beyond a certain point. As a result, once a few people do it, and it’s not reprimanded, then it’ll continue unabated. In the case of Techcrunch, from what I’ve read, it almost seems supported.

The number of comments is another issue but one that’s more difficult to control, especially if the comments are civil. People who may have commented likely won’t beyond a certain point fearing that their comments will simply be ignored; nobody wants to be ignored.

I predict that an active site owner who continually responds to comments left on the site is more likely to have others continue to contribute.

In both scenarios here, though, it depends on a heavily active site owner to maintain that community. The ability to use the wisdom of crowds to vote up or down comments still isn’t a quality solution, in my opinion, because it can support a mob mentality which really isn’t any better.

Several blogs I frequent have become less interesting with more readers – or, I should say, more commenters. To paraphrase one that I’m talking about; the signal vs noise ratio goes way down. There are just too many haters and people that don’t add anything to the conversation.

Another example, I think, is http://www.codinghorror.com which, although the post quality is generally good, is actually made less interesting by the comments. Many posts now have 100+ comments, and I just don’t have the time or inclination to read them all, so I generally skip them altogether. This has the effect of ‘turning me off’ the blog, as something of the community feel is lost. I’ve read that blog since the early days, and I don’t get nearly so much from it now.

Also - and I don’t level this at anyone in particular - I find that if a blog becomes really successful and the writer gains notoriety in their field, then ego becomes a factor and posts sometimes have a self-serving slant to them.

Some blogs, and bloggers, are victims of their own success.

A popular blog is a hungry beast, end of story. Your only option is to turn the comments off and hope when you can’t control the conversation, or try and keep your blog from not becoming the well read blog you set out to make it be