Why i don`t support comments on my blog
The reverse cowgirl pointed me to this post where chip rosenthal claims that "[a] blog without comments is wrong" because it demonstrates the bloggers unwillingness to listen to other people.
As you most probably noticed this site doesn’t offer visitors the possibility to comment on posts. I thought quite a lot about the implications of allowing comments on my site from a webmasters and bloggers point of view and decided not to include this feature for three reasons (actually for one of the three reasons, because the other two only apply to widely popular sites, but perhaps i’ll have to deal with these issues some time in the future):
1. If you start a blog that you don’t really promote and that isn’t accidentally linked by an a-list blogger, it’s likely that very few people will visit your site. This usually results in links below your posts that read something like "comments(0)". I personally think that there’s nothing more pitiful than a site with lots of posts on its frontpage drawing no single comment. My current traffic statistics imply that i wouldn’t get many comments, so my site doesn’t feature them.
2. You risk to lose control over your site to some degree and more important, to lose control over your traffic. This happened to kottke.org short time ago and i’m not willing to pay a 10 gb traffic bill just because i allowed comments. It’s not very likely that something like that happens to my site, but you never know, perhaps i’ll get /.ed someday (though in that case my traffic bill will most likely go through the roof even without comments).
3. Comments on widely popular sites tend to become unreadable and useless because people won’t read myriads of comments, but feel obliged to comment on the topic anyway, resulting in constant repetition of already voiced opinions. Just try to follow the comments on /. for a while and you’ll understand what i mean: even though they offer a magnificent community-driven comment-rating system it’s still almost impossible to follow a discussion: if you set your threshold too high, you won’t be able to follow the discussion thread cause you’ll miss a lot of comments, but if you set your threshold too low you’ll be flooded by mediocre comments.
Of course there are lots of weblogs that benefit a lot from comments, but i don’t see that for my site right now. As soon as it seems appropriate, i’ll add them, but even then it’s unlikely that i’ll allow comments on all my posts because there are things that just don’t need to be discussed or should be discussed in a more appropriate place. Therefore i understand perfectly well why some people feel more comfortable without comments on their site.