Imagine a world where you can get an RSS feed of all the comments that you leave, to save for reference or repost as your comment blog. A world where you can subscribe to all the comments that another person leaves across different journals. Imagine a world where you can post a video comment as easily as a text comment. A world where you can simultaneously Tweet your comments to your Twitter account. Where other readers can rate your comments, and those ratings shape your reputation as measured in points. A world where the owner of the journal where you're commenting can change how your comment is displayed, with a note that the moderator edited the comment, but the original unedited comment is retained in your commenter profile. Where comments and reactions to your journal posts in other journals and on other services -- blogs, delicious, Twitter -- are automatically aggregated and appear as links in your posts' comments. Imagine a world where readers who don't have an account with your journal service can post comments under their Facebook account.

What is this brave new world, that has such features in it? A commenter's paradise, a nightmarish dystopia, or just another alternate universe?

It's called Disqus -- a free, third-party hosted comment system that can be plugged into other platforms like WordPress and Drupal, but not journal services built on LiveJournal code (and yes, Disqus does allow for threaded comments and email notifications).

Comment cultures -- the norms, expectations, values and practices that coalesce around commenting systems -- are driven by both social and technical factors. The tensions, conflicts, and debates thus play out differently in different cultures.

Outside of LiveJournal, there was an extended blog debate last year about comments being fragmented across different places, rather than concentrated on a single post, and who owns comments. But the issues and dynamics differ from the recent discussions around the etiquette of directing all comments to Dreamwidth in crossposts to LJ, and the solution emerged through comment aggregation services that pull in comments left on other sites to the primary blog post, rather than shutting down comments in one location.

Simple tools to import and export comments -- both the comments you post, and the ones others post on your site -- are built in to the new Disqus-style comment systems without controversy, and data portability is the byword on everyone's lips. Yet the concept that the presence of your comments on a site may imply that you support the site hosting your comments is hardly unique to Dreamwidth detractors.

Dreamwidth essentially inherits the comment ecology of LJ, and the short-term costs (and relative priority) of further innovation -- both social and technical -- are prohibitive. But there's nothing inherently natural, inevitable, or even automatically optimal about this LJ/DW comment culture, no matter how familiar. The current rhetoric and beliefs around control over comments (viz. redirecting and importing) are products of that social/technical culture -- shaping even the questions and assertions posed around fannish norms or copyright -- and would play out differently (or not at all) under other comment ecologies.

Last year, I posted about my ambivalence that Dreamwidth would be built on the LJ codebase (vs., say, Drupal) and therefore effectively be locked in to some social/technical choices and locked out of others -- for instance, retaining LJ's code for managing comments rather than converting to Disqus. Now, I can readily think of several compelling reasons why Dreamwidth arguably shouldn't use Disqus (or a similar plug-in like JS-Kit), but my concern then and now was that the debate was really a moot point, since it was never really a viable option for the LJ codebase.

And you know, I can and do live with that -- but I also consider it a less than ideal tradeoff. One thing that does bother me about both LJ and DW is that certain features that would be free to me on a Disqus-type system -- specifically the ability to edit my own comments, and to get them automatically emailed to me -- are limited to paid users on LJ/DW. There are areas where a tiered array of features and options stratified by ability and willingness to pay seems reasonable and acceptable; for me, this isn't one of them. I'm also frustrated by the lack of RSS feeds for comments on LJ/DW; sure, I can get them via email if I track a post, but RSS feeds give me more options and flexibility and they've been standard features on other blog systems for quite a while now.

(For what it's worth, I did import all comments along with my LJ posts to my DW journal, but set all my imported entries to private. I couldn't get a good enough handle on the potential ethical issues of reproducing other people's comments in a different space without their [fore]knowledge or permission. I provisionally decided that I'd feel comfortable moving comments to a new site/service/host if I were losing or shutting down the old one [i.e. my LJ], but I wasn't comfortable mirroring comments so that they appeared in two different places. And I am not comfortable with some of the breezy dismissal and outright mockery that I've seen in response to people raising concerns about comment importing -- even or especially when I don't share or necessarily agree with those particular concerns, nor have any problem with anybody who's DW journal imported comments that I'd made on their LJ.)
 

ETA: see also the sequel to this post.