Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror loves internet comments on blogs. He even went as
far as to say that a blog without comments isn't really a blog at all
(https://web.archive.org/web/20060206150506/http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000421.html)

He's not wrong, but he's not exactly right, either.

Comments are frequently useful. They let visitors to a site respond to the
original author's points and carry on conversations that will go over things
that the author maybe didn't go over, or misjudged, or hadn't even considered.
Those are all fine, and I've wasted more time just paging through comment
threads than I should probably admit. I've learned a lot, I've been entertained
(sometimes both at once!), and if you would have asked me about comments twenty
years ago, I would have probably told you that they were good, that they were
useful, and that they were something that enhanced a web site, if done right. 

But these days, I've reversed that stance.

I run a few websites, their addresses don't really matter here, but none of them
are currently accepting comments, and they aren't likely to any time soon. 

There are lots of reasons why I came to that decision. In fact, it wasn't even a
conscious decision at first, it just sort of organically happened after a while.
It's worth noting that I rarely post comments on 'real' blogs, too. I usually
find it more cathartic to sit down and write a longer-form thing and post it to
my own sites if I want to get something off my chest. I know that some people
live their entire online days and nights logged in to their favorite comment
machine and comment and favorite and like and comment and share and comment and
subscribe and comment until it's somehow the middle of the night. That used to
be an apt description of the way I would browse the internet, but it hasn't
really been for a while.

And since I don't really comment much, or if I do decided to make a long-form
comment to an article (like this one!), then the original author likely won't
see it and therefore won't respond to it,which seems to be the crux of Atwood's
argument in favor of comments, but what he doesn't seem to consider is that I,
the commenter, may not be concerned with his response to my response to his
article (if he ends up reading this, then that's great, but if he doesn't, that
doesn't hurt my feelings). Worse, he supposes that the authors of the pieces
always, or nearly always are interested in what the commenters have to say, and
as the years go by and I start getting older, it turns out that I'm not.

That's not to say that there aren't interesting and useful and insightful
comments to be found, there absolutely are those types of comments all over the
place. But just due to the law of large numbers, now that there are a lot more
people on the internet, for every good comment that you might find on an
article, there are a dozen irrelevant ones. I don't have the endless hours of
boredom I had in the 90's, and just wading through the mountain of excrement to
find a kernel of corn is not something I really want to do much any more,
especially since the piles have gotten larger.

Ostensibly websites have mechanisms in place for keeping out the riffraff, but
they usually do a job that ranges from nonexistent to almost-not-awful. Policing
comments takes the one thing that I don't really have as much of as I did in the
past: time. My websites area all a one person operation, and I make time for
them because I enjoy the process. Any time that I have to spend moderating and
deleting comments that some yahoo (or google or altavista) left on my site
advertising some online casino or whatever garbage they're trying to use my site
as a vehicle to drive traffic to, is time that I don't spend creating content or
applying updates, and I need to spend my time where it's going to give me the
most benefit.

I also like to have content in a place that I control. It's one of the big
reasons that I closed my Facebook account and why I took a hiatus from twitter:
I was tired of creating content for other people and other sites. I'm not
totally against things like forums or anything, where value is derived from 
discussion, and will participate in that kind of thing on occasion. But if that
site goes away tomorrow and takes all of my content down with it, then what? The
site wasn't mine, and, according to the fine print, the comments I posted
weren't even mine any more after I submitted them (we're not going to argue the
semantics of copyright law here, that's another discussion for another time). My
comments are now the property of 'The Website' to do with them whatever they
want. If I instead put my comments somewhere where I control, then I have more
control over them (though, once these words leave my server and get to you, all
bets are off, and there's not really very much I can do about that, even if I
wanted to). 

There are basically two kinds of comments: those worth keeping, and those not
worth keeping. The barrier to posting comments on websites now (and, you might
argue articles themselves) is so low now that it encourages low-thought,
low-effort, low-value communication, and that's what fills up a lot of comment
sections. And the ones worth keeping? How do you collect them? How do you
feature them if you're a site operator? Do you even want to? And if you created
a lengthy tutorial about how to do something and it lives in a comment section,
how do you point others to it? 

If I create something and put it up on this site, it's a little bit harder than
filling in a text box, hitting the 'submit' button, and firing it into the
world. I have to open a text editor, write a thing, save it, upload it, and then
update the .rss (or not, if I want to do a stealth update). It forces me to be
more thoughtful about what I write and post, and, I hope, the signal to noise
ratio is higher because of it. In short, I'm writing what I hope are comments
that are worth keeping. At least, they're worth keeping to me, which, since this
is my website, is what I'm primarily concerned with.

The problem, though, is confusing noise with signal. It's kind of like how you
could say that McDonald's serves good food because they sell so much of it.
Comment sections are kind of like that. They taste good, and are fine in
moderation, but if that's all you consume, then you're going to end up giving
your brain a heart attack. Okay, so my analogy got away from me a little bit,
but I think you get the idea (and if you don't, please see me after class). 

I want to be clear here: I'm not condemning noise or advocating signal, both are
important. What I am saying is that we need both (though proportions will vary
from person to person), and consuming pure signal is just as unbalanced as
consuming pure noise. Unfortunately, it's gotten so easy to produce noise that
it sometimes seems like noise is winning.

So, it's my small effort of not taking or displaying comments on my websites
that I hope to swing the pendulum the other way, if even only slightly. Of
course, that presumes that content I create is signal (or, leans more toward
signal than to noise), and it is, to me, but it might be noise to someone else.
Instead of firing off noise to counter noise, I'd much prefer if anyone so
inclined would respond to noise with signal, or, better yet, to respond to
signal with signal (i.e. positive reinforcement). 

Last updates 19 Jun 2018