These are the reasons why nevali.net does not have a comments box
(there are several, but people have asked)
Once upon a time, I had a comments box. In two years, I received two, perhaps three, legitimate comments. The number of spam comments (all detected as such and suppressed from view, mind), measured in the thousands. Because of this, I switched comments off—it just wasn’t worth anybody’s while.
I moved this blog to Tumblr a while ago. Tumblr doesn’t support comments natively; this I considered fine, because I’d already disabled comments on the old WordPress blog. I lost nothing in particular by way of this transition.
Third-party commenting systems are all terrible at what they do, in no small part because they’re drastically limited in how they can do it.
When I (occasionally) use somebody else’s comments box to reply to a post (if it’s there, I’ll use it—it’s only polite), I tend to find it an exercise in frustration. None of the niceties I have for posting are available when commenting on somebody else’s site. I’ve lost count of the number of comments which have inexplicably vanished into nothingness upon pressing the mysterious “Submit” button (which I am starting to believe in this context refers to what I’m doing myself, rather than what I’m doing to the HTML form).
On those sites I see which do have comments, and where they are actually used regularly, the signal:noise ratio is awful.
The Web has a built-in reply mechanism. It’s called the link. If I reply to something in a post, I’ll link to it. You do the same. Simples.
If you leave a comment on my blog (were I to, hypothetically, enable comments), I could delete it at will. The reverse also applies. I’ve seen those who are in favour of everything having the ability to retain attached comments mention that often the comments are more valuable than the posts themselves: if this is the case, do those comments not deserve to be posts in themselves?
The number of people reading this blog who would actually have something to say and don’t have some form of blog, journal, or other self-publishing system can be falls somewhere in the low zeroes. Whose blog system would you rather use to say something—the one you chose, or the one I did?
If I reply to you via my blog, the people who regularly read my blog (but not necessarily yours) will see it too. They may get curious, and have a look at what you’d posted originally. You might link to my comment, perhaps with a witty riposte of your own, and the same applies in reverse. Et cetera.
If you think you need comments on your blog because otherwise people wouldn’t know how popular you are, you’re doing it wrong.
