“ Comments. I got rid of them. I know this is going to be contentious. My current view on comments is I really don’t like them — at all, anywhere on the internet. I’m all for communication between author and reader, but comments are the lowest possible denominator. More often than not, they bring out the absolute worst in people.
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I made this same decision when I decided the old Sci-Fi Hi-Fi blog and my Vox blog had run their respective courses and opted to switch to the Tumblr format. I think the comments on my post about leaving Apple, which got to the front page of Digg and drew legions of contrarians who didn’t know anything about me but were only too eager to tell me what a whiner I was, were the last straw.
I think there’s been a sea change in the quality of discourse on the Internet in the past few years. I suspect it’s a combination of the mainstreaming of blogs and the advent of social aggregators like Digg, but I think we’re now at a point where the bar for responding to a post needs to be higher. So, while I do miss the feedback that let’s me know people are reading, I think the age of comments as a useful mechanism for discourse is over.