Why Despair.nu and other commenting sites Suck*!

A few months ago, I decided to try http://www.despair.nu. After a few months of commenting on sites that take hours to load, and text thats extremely small, I have come to the conclusion is sucks. I will now give you my reasons.

1. Your’re forced to comment every 2 days. After you comment, others don’t, which basically defeats the purpose of the site.

2. You get comments that don’t relate to the post at all. For example, from my “Nerd-like Rantings” post, I recieved this comment, which barely relates to my post.

I hate plugins. I just don’t bother with them really 0____o
Stupid Despair tells me to comment you when you have a blog that is seriously hard to comment on! Meh.

To be honest, I don’t give a shit if its hard to comment on. I see that because I don’t “whine about my hair style and “Gasp” I think So and so likes me” it magically makes my posts hard to comment on. I mean, I’ll be honest, some of my posts aren’t exactly easy to comment on, but if you can’t think of anything, comment on another post, or don’t comment at all. It’s that simple.

3. People come, read 1 entry, comment and leave. What is the point of this? You put a lot of time and energy into making a site, then people come and spend 3 minutes skimming an entry, leaving a shitty comment and leaving, never to look back.

Now is the time where I could go into how sites your suppossed to comment usually include a HUGE header image (for example, on one site, the image was 900 X 612px and the site took 8 minutes to load. Its a bit much, and I only stayed because I was required to by the commenting site.

The site itself is run fine. Albeit the moderators don’t exactly moderate all the time, but its expected with 300 active sites. The idea though is kinda iffy. Force people to comment in hopes that others will stay. This like many ideas may seem (or have seemed) good on paper, but in real life it doesn’t work.

*I apologize if I offended anyone with this rant, but its all true.

• Kier

  lol well said, I agree with you, I signed up but got fed up of it lol

  August 18, 2006 at 6:17 pm

• Julianne

  I’ve tried a couple of commenting sites, and you’re right — they’re just not worth the hassle. I think that they are a good idea in theory, but in practice most sites don’t gain returning visitors.

  August 18, 2006 at 10:32 pm

• lindsAy

  When I used actually blog regularly, I belonged to xposure.nu and I was religious about commenting on time but no one ever commented on my site that I can remember. I was also religious about reporting the people that didn’t comment, but I don’t think that did any good, either…

  August 18, 2006 at 11:34 pm

• Jem

  That entire rant is exactly why I have never, and will never, join a website that enforces commenting on weblogs. I will comment when I want to, not when I’m told to.

  August 19, 2006 at 11:37 pm

• Nick

  I didn’t enjoy that AT ALL. Commenting on sites with like 2px font size and images that took literally on hours to load. Quite sickening really.

  (Whoa, I got a comment from the great Jem!) :worship:

  August 20, 2006 at 12:23 am

• Risa

  I understand about the commenting thing although I am part of three I only get mail from 2.I use to get frequents from despair but for some reason they havent been mailing me any.Then the other two send me sites that havent been updated in months or ones that are on hiatus for months..so all in all it’s pointless,but every now and again you’ll come across a good commenter.
  Originally I think despair was to link the sites and send users to comment on them and jus leave it to the user whether or not they wanna come back.I found most of my affilates through despair-and part of my frequents-so I dunno.

  August 21, 2006 at 9:42 pm