John Gruber has addressed (once again) why his ever-popular site Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:
What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.
[…]
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.
Unsurprisingly, I had two other comment-related stories waiting for me at Google Reader this morning. First, Derek Powazek, who turned off his site’s comments after a recent redesign:
I don’t think the problem is that people are stupid. I think that people, when given crappy tools, with almost no oversight, no incentive to behave, and no semblance of real identity, often behave stupidly.
The choice is not really to have comments on or off. The choice is: What is the level of community interaction you want to foster on your site? What’s the purpose of the site, and is community interaction part of that purpose? Too many people don’t think about these questions as deeply as John Gruber clearly has.
I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.
John Hicks has also weighed in:
Derek just echoed some of my thoughts, and helps me explain why I’ve turned of my comments recently. I feel able to post more often now, it’s just spare time that I need now.
Spam is also a reason. It used to be that posts over 5 weeks ago would attract comment spam, nowadays it’s a matter of a few hours. While Textpattern does a good job of filtering off a lot of the crap, there are always a few that sneak through. As a discussion system blog comments feel broken.
ForkBombr — since day one — has been in the ranks of comment-free sites. I’ve had emails and tweets asking me to turn them on. ForkBombr was even used in a presentation here in Memphis at a “Social Media Camp” as an example of what not to do. I’ve been approached in person on the subject. Talking about blog comments at a bar is sure way to win over friends.
Comments are distracting to readers and time-consuming to writers. That said, I’m always humbled when I see my readership grow (which it has steadily from the beginning) and even more humbled when people want to talk to me about something I’ve written. I want to communicate with my readers, but doing it via comments isn’t my cup of tea. If you want to get ahold of me, you can reach me via email on the “Contact Me” page, same as always.
Besides, exchanging emails back and forth is far more engaging than just leaving your idea on my doorstep in the form of a comment.