So it looks like Yahoo has been taken out to proverbial the woodshed over some changes over its new TV subdomain (TV.yahoo.com) at its official blog. Users have come out vociferously against some Ajax-ified, and flash-ied up site, and Yahoo has allowed all of the comments, good and bad, on its site. And I say, “good on Yahoo!”.
I’ve blogged about it before, and I think its worthwhile repeating again. Without a comments section, all a blog is a one-way form of communication, much like the main stream media. You get to stand up on your soapbox and tell people what you think. Its not a dialogue — which is really what blogging is really all about. And even if people blog about it on their own blog, without comments there are no potential for trackbacks, so that people can’t follow blogging “conversations” either. I would go so far as to say a “real” definition of a blog must include a comments section.
Corporate types will always be concerned about negative comments, which is a valid concern; however, if you’ve got a product or service that’s worth blogging about, your fans should be coming out to support you — which they have, in Yahoo!’s case. Also, by allowing full comments, and better yet, responding to some of them, you gain a valuable sense of integrity and, as loathe as I am to type these words, “street cred” — that you just can’t buy.
Negative comments are the price you’ve got to pay for having a Real Blog, and companies that have them deserve to be recognized. It shows that they believe in their own business, and they respect their customers enough to allow them to have a public opinion on their business.
2 Comments
They aren’t always so quick to take their lumps….although leaving the comments, both good and bad, is awesome. That being said, I’ve emailed them on numerous occasions about the slowness of their POS Yahoo music player AND the new Yahoo mail beta which is needlessly slow. Perhaps it’s harder to ignore hundreds of comments on public display where others could be encouraged to say, “You know, I’ve been having problems with that music player too. Or I wish that the new email beta wasn’t so slow..” It seems that people would also be more likely to respond with “me too”
“Leaving the comments, both good and bad, is awesome.”
True, and I admire how Sal and Jeremy have been working here.
But that “leaving the bad comments” approach comes from newsgroups and forums that tech companies have hosted for years. Such companies have had to deal with this question already, and weblogs don’t change the basic principles. But such public feedback loops may not work for other groups which haven’t had to ask this question before… different cultural histories.
jd/adobe
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