Recently, I have noticed what seems to be a growing trend from sites and blogs that I consider to be legit, as well as, extremely valuable, promising money or fame for the quantity of comments left on their site.

What Do You Think?

I am curious what folks really think about this practice. To be honest, I am not sure what I think the about entire issue. I believe there are many ways and multiple sides to examine.

I think rewarding others by providing trackback links to those who write and comment about your site, or the products you are promoting, or your articles is a great way to say “thank you.” However, doing so based on models of quantity may ultimately backfire.

Human SPAM or Computer SPAM - It’s Still SPAM!

Most of the SPAM comments I have seen from my other blogs this year have been, “Right on! Keep up the good work!” or “Good Post” or “Great Article”, quite frankly, I don’t care if that comment comes from a human being or an automated posting application – I do not see any value in these comments. I’m grown-up enough not to need my ego stroked for no apparent reason. Also, there are many services today which provide that level of feedback from readers, such as, “digg” or “BUMPzee!”. I think comment value comes from well thought out reactions to our articles. It makes our articles better and the communities we are trying to build more valuable.

Moderating SPAM… really?

The sites that have started to promise these types of rewards affirm that they will not allow comments from folks who appear to be SPAMming, but, I have to wonder how many resources will be needed to really ensure that level of quality, and how long it will be before their comments are never read by those who frequent their site because they are full of “Good post” or “Wow, great article, couldn’t have said it better myself” or “Keep up the good work – Great Article.” All of which would take less than 10 seconds for a person to write.

An Alternative - How About Quality?

I really think it would be much better to re-consider the reward model being used and apply a “Post Quality” metric to reward your commentators that way. I doubt there would be a way to automate this, but for those of us who work hard to generate legitimate content – that is a manual process too. I do not believe it would be that much more of a time investment to read a few comments and make a subjective decision to reward the ones which we like and appreciate the most.

Your Turn - Let Us Know What You Think