16th
why i broke into the code and enabled comments
Comments are against the general spirit of the tumblr blogging software. Tumblr is best designed for grabbing other things off the internet and commenting on them briefly. The “follower” feature further disqualifies comments: Either each successive comment would have to show up on every follower’s dashboard, which would be intolerable, or they’d have to be banned from the dashboard, in which case there’d be stuff going on on your tumblr that followers wouldn’t know about—-again, contrary to the spirit of tumblr. In the ideal tumblr world, in the tumblr utopia, *everyone* would have a tumblr—the form of comment would be the reblog.
(Incidentally, along with cute puppies, I’m canceling italics, since they don’t show up on reblogs. From here on out it’s asterisks—and CAPS, of course, like Kanye.)
Anyway, but code is not destiny, and you shouldn’t always use things strictly according to their optimal function. Furthermore tumblr isn’t entirely dead-set against comments, since they allow you to go into the code easily enough and insert them. My doing so was partly because the two options tumblr leaves you in terms of discussing things—reblogging and email—are not ideal. Re-blogging encourages one kind of conversation—one-way, basically—and accelerates some of the thumbs-up/thumbs-down ethos of online life in general. And email… I like email. But I was getting some emails that I thought would have been better off in public, as comments, where they could be discussed by others and challenged and so on.
Finally there’s the larger philosophical problem of comments. I think, generally speaking, that every site gets the commenters it deserves. That’s a principle that probably could use some refinement—I haven’t looked into Slate’s Fray recently, but back in the day it was really populated by out-and-out loons—but in general I’ve found it to be the case. It’s disingenuous for people writing online, especially for people who are expert at writing online, to pretend like the commenters they attract (over and over again) are somehow incidental to the work they do, or the context in which they do it. (Will Leitch was recently guilty of making this argument in his email exchange with Buzz Bissinger at Deadspin.com.) You may not be legally responsible for the things that appear on your site, but you are I think morally responsible. It represents you and is a response to you. (And it should be said that Gawker is a site that has developed various ways of policing its comments over the years.) And maybe Slate, with its Beltway-Microsoft meritocratic uber-sanity, deserved those insane people. I don’t know. I do love my commenters on this tumblr so far.
And here, since we’re no longer doing cute puppies, is Malevich—reblogged by Alexander Brenner in Amsterdam in 1997. For this particular reblog he spent six months in (an Amsterdam) jail.
UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that most other blog platforms support comments. Which, yes, right—I forgot to say that I like Tumblr best. It’s got a nice loose feel to it; and I like the Follower function, it exercises a kind of discipline. And, boy, tumblr is just easy to use. I’ve also signed a hefty endorsement contract. So.
