Techdirt Passes Two Million Comments!
Just a quick post to note an amazing (to me!) milestone. At some point last week (on Wednesday basically), this site passed over two million comments. That is since the site’s commenting feature launched in 1999. If you want the quick history: we started a newsletter 27 years ago on August 23, 1997, and it became a website in the spring of 1998, but we didn’t shift to the blog format with comments until March of 1999.
So, that’s basically two million comments across 25 years. Holy shit, that’s a lot of comments. Thank you to all of you who participate, especially the ones who add value with thoughtful, insightful, and funny comments. That’s what we’re always looking for.
It’s kind of incredible to me that this has lasted this long, especially given just how much the web has changed over this time, including how commenting has changed. People don’t remember this at all, but when Techdirt launched in the blog format (using Slashcode 0.3), it posted the email address publicly if a user entered their email address in the form. Because in those days, that’s what people expected. The idea that people might want to keep their email addresses private, or that spam would be a problem, wasn’t even part of the thought process!
How far we’ve come.
I had thought about figuring out which comment was the actual two millionth, but that’s complicated by lots of factors, including that there is still plenty of comment spam that we miss. Just a few days before we hit the two million comment mark, I happened across an article from years ago that had about 50 comment spam messages that we had missed at the time, but which I promptly deleted. So what was the actual two millionth comment isn’t really definable, as I could very well find another cache of old spam on another day and delete them as well.
And, of course, we get somewhere on the order of 5,000 attempts at comment spam a day which are blocked before they ever get on the site. Only a very small percentage of spam gets through (though it’s still frustrating). If we were counting the number of attempted comments, including spam, then we’d be many millions higher.
Still, thank you to the community here of (mostly) productive commenters who keep things interesting and keep us on our toes here. The community aspects of this site are always what make it the best.