Comment Challenge Day 5: Comment on a Post You Disagree With

For today’s challenge, you’re going to find a blog post where you don’t agree with the author and leave a comment.

It took me a long time to get to this post because I had trouble finding something I disagreed with.  I read a lot of blogs by like-minded people, a lot of “just the facts” sorts of news stories, and updates from friends and relatives.  After a lot of looking, I found something that I could kind of disagree with.

• What happened as a result of you disagreeing with the blogger? How did they respond? How did you respond? I don’t know yet.  Maybe the author will respond to me here.

• What do you usually do if you find a post with which you disagree? Do you comment publicly? Email the blogger? Or do you just move on? Usually, I just move on.  However, I may bring up the blog with friends, family, and colleagues off-line to sound out the issue with them.

• If you comment, typically how do you engage the blogger? Do you ask questions to better understand his/her position? Do you make statements to explain your position? Do you track comments so that you can return to continue the conversation? I have asked a question in the past to better understand someone’s position, but never got a response; I know because I had already started tracking comments by then.  Today, I did make statements to explain my position, but I felt that the comment space was rather confining.  I wanted to be concise, but I had a lot to say and I’m not sure my point survived my editing.

• If you’re a blogger, how do you feel if people post comments where they disagree with you? How do you handle these? I don’t think I have a wide enough audience to get a lot of disagreement.  I don’t know how I would handle posts where people disagreed with me.  If the post were simply “disagreeable” I might just delete it, but if the person were initiating a true debate, I would probably leave it and see what other people have to say before chiming in myself.  Who knows .  .  . maybe I’d have to adjust my opinion.