When migrating your blog to Medium, how do you value 6 years’ worth of comments?
Medium lets you migrate text, images, legacy URLs and metatags — but comments just disappear.
Like so many others over the past year, I’ve been really thinking about moving my pencil blog, Woodclinched, over to Medium. It’s gotten to a point where Medium has a pretty nifty, useful migration tool, and it has what I’ve been waiting for — the ability to assign 301 redirects to some of my legacy post URLs that have a decent amount of SEO juice, thereby maintaining its established search engine ranking.
(“SEO juice” is a highly technical term — I wouldn’t expect most of you to understand.)
But there’s still one thing that holds me back, and I feel a little silly about it. My six-years’ worth of comment threads — what’s going to happen to them?
I’ve blogged about wooden pencils since 2007, since what one might refer to as the glory days of blogging. It was unthinkable not to include a comments section; if only because there was no real good way to talk to that post with those who also have read it.
Twitter and Facebook were both around, but neither one of them were (yet) great at connecting you to these niche networks of people.
Whole communities existed in your blog’s comments section.
Don’t laugh, but I used to hold “Open Thread Tuesdays” where I’d propose a topic and we’d talk about it in the blog’s comments. It was unwieldy, slow and hard to follow, but there was still a pretty active stream of commenters discussing and talking back and forth about their thoughts. It seems silly now (it was a thing, I swear!), but it just shows how much value comments used to have on one’s blog.
Nowadays, most of that discussion is happening elsewhere, at least for stationery. (We have a extremely active group for The Erasable Podcast and quite a community on Twitter.) If I was starting a new blog, or migrating a much younger blog, I’d have no hesitation to move to a platform without comment thread. Medium’s in-line comments or separate-post responses are just perfect.
But what do I do with my 500+ legacy comments? So many of them contribute greatly to the value of the post itself. Heck, those “Open Thread” posts mean nothing without the attached comments. I might as well not even import those.
I’m going to sit with this for a while. There’s so much to like with migrating Woodcinched to a Medium publication; the discoverability alone is fantastic. And maybe there’s something else I can do with those comments — paste them into the bottom of the post? Keep the Wordpress blog around as a backup to archive those comments?
I suspect others who have migrated to Medium just killed their comments section. There’s a lot of worthless contributions made in those comments, but when there’s a gem, it’s worth saving.
