Nina, you initially said: "...ultimately great discussion comes from relinquishing control to others" (source: twitter.com). I completely agree. But I do not think bloggers who don't support comments are afraid to relinquish to control, or are opposed to an open discussion.

I have relinquished control here. You can say whatever you'd like and invite whomever you'd like. But this space is not "open" to the world and that is not a bad thing.

I definitely agree that comments in general are outdated: but not because there shouldn't be an open space where anyone can see where anyone else is. Comments need to be part of the medium people are using: Twitter is both a place to respond to others, and to voice your own ideas. Tumblr is built the same way. The trick is being able to focus a conversation within a group of people, so you're siphoning off a unique orbit for the conversation, but you're also in the same galaxy as everybody else, and that's important. There certainly is a future for semi-closed conversation, but I think that for the vast majority, a truly open platform will provide conversational benefits far beyond what can be generated in closed spaces.

ETA: You need to be talking to a specific group of people, you can't have conversation without participants. But you also need to create a space where anybody can join and find other people to talk to.

I read Nina's original comment about "relinquishing control" somewhat differently. For a discussion to be great, each participant needs to know when to relinquish control of the conversation and let everyone else talk.

Josh seems to have interpreted "relinquishing control" in the context of the person who owns the site. Some platforms, such as Facebook and Disqus, allow people to add *their* words in *my* space, while others, such as Twitter and Tumblr, allow people only to respond to me in their own spaces.

I think many bloggers disable comments because they are reluctant to *exert* control, not relinquish it, and great conversation comes from the right balance. Comments require that the host actively set the tone, moderate spam, ...

... and starve the trolls. Branch provides tools to make this easier, which is great.

We feel like 2nd-class citizens in comments because that's what we are, as guests at someone else's table. Services like Branch that minimize the role/prominence of the host fall somewhere in between, but by keeping the conversation both public and closed, they only shift, rather than eliminate, the class boundary: Everyone participating in a conversation is on equal footing, but everyone in the audience feels like they're a 2nd-class citizen, unable to participate as equals.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it creates a dynamic like that of an IRL panel discussion. When I'm at my dinner table, I don't have the entire Internet as an audience.

Well, I think this is a subtle difference: I think ownership of commenting space is an old relic. In order for comments to truly be sustainable, we need to let go of our ownership over those spaces. Just like we conceptually understand that things tagged with #justinbieber on Twitter don't have anything to do with Justin Bieber officially, we need to create open conversation spaces that are approached similarly. That's how we get away from feeling like second class citizens.

RE: your last point, it's interesting to note that increasingly IRL panel discussions are trying to experiment with opening things up: creating hashtags and ways to follow the backchannel conversation relating to any particular panel (or talk), these discussions are *trying* to be more open. So, why are we leaning conversations more towards what real life is trying to jump away from?

Nina, in your original conversation with Josh and Andy on Twitter, you said we should "leave conversation as a commons" *and* that each of us should take "ownership of a small nook/cranny." To me, these are very much in conflict, and that conflict is one of the biggest underlying questions about how to improve online discussion.

Denton's analogy to the tragedy of the commons — other than being a great marketing slogan for Kinja — frames the problem really well. Fully public, communally owned (anyone can comment here), finite resources (but there's only one thread, only so much room for our comments) will always be subject to over-exploitation and diminishing marginal utility.

So it follows that regulation and/or enclosure (in its various forms) apply here, too.

Branch is literally enclosed — we let people create "nooks/crannies" of their own that have communal ownership within a much smaller community.

Kinja, too — it dices up a single comments thread into multiple and granting ownership of each to a single individual, rather than a small group.

Places like AVC.com have, I think, self-regulated their way into this same model. A small group (i.e. Fred, his editors, and most frequent commenters) actively regulates and takes de-facto ownership over the space. But this is a high bar.

At some level, I think these discussion spaces will always become more enclosed via their platforms or regulated by their users.

Right, what you're talking about is definitely true, for *finite* resources. The thing about online space is, it's pretty much infinite. There's no reason why everyone shouldn't be able to comment on anything, but they should also be able to lay claim to a little bit of space and start a discussion there. It's still in the commons and so others can discuss it, but, users have a little portion that they've siphoned off for the conversation they want to have, with a small subset of people. The key here is, you still need these general commons to be open and accessible, you still need people to feel like they conversation has a way to be part of the larger ecosystem. That's when you start feeling like second class citizens.

I think there is an element of finiteness, though. There is assumably an infinite number of places to discuss things online, but they're not all created equal.

There is only *one* comments section on (to stick with my example from before) *one* AVC.com blog post about Yahoo "no longer being dead" to Fred (avc.com). It's not rivalrous (i.e. if I participate, you can still participate), but the value of that discussion can diminish as it goes on — unless it's effectively regulated. It's not a simple network effects model.

> "You still need people to feel like they conversation has a way to be part of the larger ecosystem. "

In what sense? You just mean versus being private (e.g. emails), or part of a single narrative?

I think there's an advantage to the Disqus model of commenting that we haven't really considered yet. If I have something to say about Fred's Yahoo post, and write about it on his blog, then there's a chance he'll see it and respond, especially if other second-class citizens respond/upvote my comment. If I write about it on Branch, then he is unlikely to ever see it and respond. Sometimes this doesn't matter (as in the below link) but other times the commenter does want to possibly hear from the "host" of the primary conversation.

I only remember bits about Gawker's new commenting system, but are they giving each commenter control over replies to their own comments? That's an interesting model, and seems to offer the best of both extremes.

I agree, Steven. Disqus is a great tool for building communities. You get to engage with your readers, and readers can engage with you. I just don't think comments support great conversation.