Comments require moderating. If you're not prepared to do that, outsource it to somewhere like reddit or HN where others can do it for you, and do it better.
But mostly I got rid of it because my blog is about _opinions_. I have an opinion. And the only thing you'll get by allowing comments, is someone underneath your delightful article telling you your opinion is wrong.
Since it's about opinions, I'm guessing it's maybe about music and movies, where there is no "true" answer about if the music/movie/etc is "good"?
Would you expect blog comments for a blog post X of yours, to be more about opinions, than comments at a social news aggr site, about the same blog post X?
I've generally found that there's definitely a difference in tone between blog comments and comments on HN/Reddit. People tend to be more direct (in a bad way) on a blog.
What about a commenting system where comments won't appear until after approval, for new posters? And once someone has posted say 7 comments that were all okay and you approved, then that person's comments get approved automatically? (because then you a bit trust that person)
I think it's sometimes a bit sad when I cannot mention something interesting & related to the blog post, that could be meaningful for the author & other readers to know about. Or maybe ask something, or ...
Why does creating threads at say Reddit not feel right?
What benefits do you see with using Reddit instead of blog comments?
They were cool back in early 2000s when Web 2.0 was hip and the internet was more friendly and innocent.
There was no Twitter and social networks were limited.
Having comments was viewed as giving others a voice who would otherwise be somewhat forced to just be readers.
Today there is no shortage of places for people to shout their thoughts.
I moderate by moving to "comments/good/$file", or "comments/spam/$file" as appropriate. Then I pull them down to my desktop (via rsync) as part of my build-process to include all the comments beneath "comments/good".
In short my blog is static, comments get written to disc, and the next time I rebuild the blog I pick up new comments - unless they're spam. The CGI also sends me an email so I know to do the necessary every few hours/days.
Of course moderation, and spam-detection, is annoying. So I outsource that to https://blogspam.net/ which is a service I created & maintain.
I've been thinking of adding something like Disqus to have comments on the page.
I'm creating embedded comments software, and I've been thinking about trying to make that software find and auto-link to [discussions about the blog post] at HN / Reddit / Twitter etc.
Maybe those discussions could be represented as a special type of blog comment — so other people could upvote [the discussion that happens at HN about the blog post], and also so you could easily delete the link to that discussion...
... Or you could add a followup comment, about that discussion, by replying to the auto-generated comment that links to HN, like: "Interesting discussion that talks about ...." — so you can type a quick summary of what people said at HN, for visitors at your blog, who are short of time.
I also use Google Alerts.
I don't have any like this for Twitter, but it would be nice to have. Currently I just watch a search query for the article title or url in the days after publishing. Or I create a standing query in TweetDeck, but that only works on desktop.
Aggregating the discussions across channels sounds interesting. Embedding that on the post page would be sweet.
For HN, there's https://news.ycombinator.com/newest which the software could monitor, and detect links to one's blog. And Reddit also has a latest-submissions feed. At both Reddit and Twitter, one can search for URLs.
Seems it's possible to auto link to submissions at HN, Reddit, and to Twitter tweets, then.
And Google Alerts can publish mentions of URLs to RSS feeds, so maybe can find & link to [other blog post that mention one's own blog post]. (There's webmentions .. not all blogs use that.) ... maybe Google Alerts has API restrictions & rate limits, so maybe won't work.
If each discussion that happens somewhere else, gets posted at one's blog, by the comments software, in the shape of [a comment with a link to the discussion] — then one would automatically get a notification about the remote discussion (since each comment generates a notification to the blog owner).
Here's the blog & comments: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/ (that's the only blog post thus far).
If you want to read more: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments