It is not uncommon to find hundreds of reader comments on any TechCrunch story – some of these comments are genuine, some are trolls while some comments are made just for the purpose of getting eyeballs.
If you are a frequent commenter on TechCrunch blog, here’s a slightly disheartening news for you – TechCrunch has stopped displaying user comments on all stories that are older than 10 days. Your comments have not been deleted from the actual WordPress database but they aren’t putting them on the site anymore.
For instance, this TechCrunch post on Nexus One by MG Seigler has 104 comments but if you look at the actual page, you’ll find none. The same is true for all the other blog posts in their archives that are older than 10 days.
Popular gadget blog Engadget recently had to shut down comments because of anonymous trolls but they at least informed their readers before implementing the change.
It would be great if Arrington too, who is rightly getting all the good press for his handling of the TechCrunch bribery scandal, could share a few details about their new comments policy with his loyal readership.
Update: TechCrunch says “your comments are safe with us”. Read the response from Robin Wauters here.
Why Blogs Remove Comments
Some blogs automatically turn-off the commenting feature from posts that are older than ‘n’ days to avoid spam but they rarely hide existing comments from their old posts. I can think of two reasons why TechCrunch may have taken this step:
1. When you have hundreds of comments on a page, it increase the size (bytes) of the page thus increasing the load-time. Matt Cutts from Google earlier hinted (see video) that site speed may be factor in page rankings and that partially explains why TechCrunch wants to limit the size of their pages.
2. Comments always have rel=nofollow so they don’t pass any link-juice to the commenter’s website but the problem is that they still dilute the amount to Google Juice that gets passed to other “dofollow” links. By removing comments, you are passing more concentrated juice to editorial links.
[*] In the following video, Matt Cutts told WebProNews that page speed may soon be a factor in Google Search.
..a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/techcrunch-removes-comments/12693/
Tags: techcrunch, Internet
Reader Comments
They surely have deleted the old comments, but why are they still showing comment form on the old stories? Doesn’t make sense. Lets wait for the official words from Techcrunch.
Written by Hameedullah Khan on 02.06.10
Hmm that is pretty bad for people who made comment there.
Written by Pawan on 02.06.10
Amit,
Remove this article soon, else you’ll loose your respect.
The comments aren’t there because of the fact the TC was hacked 10 days ago (you must have been aware of that, unless you are living in a cave).
All the posts were restored except the comments.
Comment count started from 1 after the hack.
Poor Amit.
Written by Gaurav on 02.06.10
I understand the reasoning, but I think 10 days is way too short a window. Maybe 30 days? Some topics are still hot even 10 days later.
Written by Sue Anne on 02.06.10
TechCrunch isn’t even that great of a weblog anyway. Your blog is leagues better than theirs, Amit.
Written by Quikboy on 02.06.10
I thought the older Techcrunch comments were killed because of the hack attack not due to speed.
If all the major blogs start doing this then I see sites springing up to discuss these stories.
Written by Darren on 02.06.10
Probably, Amit should do a bit research before pointing on someone.
link
Written by Tajim on 02.06.10
Our response: link
Written by Robin Wauters on 02.06.10
Hi Amit,
I am a regular follower of your blog and do like your articles but I would like to express that “When you have hundreds of comments on a page, it increase the size (bytes) of the page thus increasing the load-time. … that partially explains why TechCrunch wants to limit the size of their pages.” is completely wrong.
Even if you have hundreds of comments are attached to a post, it does not effect the file size of that particular post significantly. It does increase the file size but that increase in file size does not effect speeds a lot. Bandwidth is really not a limitation for texts these days, it’s actually latency that matters.
Just an honest comment.
Written by Archit Tantia on 02.06.10
A simple solution: Once comments are archived, have comments be a separately loaded page that is not indexed by search engines.
Written by davidwr on 02.06.10
Amit, seems like Techcrunch has a different viewpoint link
Written by Vaibhav on 02.06.10
I am sure you would not approve this comment, but if you do, I would love to know your feedback on this entire TechCrunch removing comments from old posts controversy which I believe started from my tweet – link
Written by Gaurav Gupta on 02.06.10
Please stick to reporting on useful apps. Do not attempt to “break stories” of dubious veracity. Christ.
Written by lababy on 02.06.10
Removing the comment shows how TechCrunch values the conversation. We’ll remember that next time we chose where to read the latest Valley gossip.
Written by Jean-Marc Liotier on 02.06.10
But thats wrong – I mean, a page with the most relevant content might be slow – but thats exactly what the user wants most of the times, people goto google for accurate results and not for results that load fast when they are opened right?
Written by iptiam on 02.06.10
This is really disheartening. I also see their response to the same but not very convinced.
Written by Shabbir Bhimani on 02.06.10
Amit, You have a counter from TC
link
Written by Zypzy on 02.07.10
not only the comments, they have also removed the pingbacks from other websites… this makes techrunch useless for us publishers, if they don’t all give a link back to the publisher site… :(
Written by sharath on 02.07.10
Amit, you really need to do your due diligence before you publish something. Otherwise, it’s a poor reflection on you.
link
Atleast put up an update remarking the real reason why it happened.
Written by eric on 02.07.10
Sites like TC get a lot traffic from the socia crowd for their recent news…Google traffic kicks in later….TC is probably leaving their comments open for the social cowd and is shutting it down for the search crowd (where spammy comments are more likely to orginate)….
Written by Rajesh on 02.07.10
Probably more to do with their teenage intern who was allegedly taking bribes…and the validity of commentator responses to posts…
Written by David Bradley on 02.08.10