I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.
It's fascinating to see this happen on both HN and Reddit, quite often even before 'comment pointing out <x>' is even posted.
This phenomenon reminds me a bit of the annoying fallacy-fallacy, or how any discussion involving -isms (capitalism, socialism) cannot be had without either or both parties pre-emptively defending against being accused of, say, the no-true-scotsman fallacy.
I've been wondering if this is a 'new' thing, or if we've always been having these increasingly meta conversations, or if perhaps I'm just getting old and tired of it.
It'd be great if you could point me to that comment, because I can't find it.
I can think of: comments in torrent trackers, where comments sometimes provide useful information; and, if this even counts, forum sites, like Reddit or HN, where comments host discussions.
I’ve certainly found that useful more than once.
Comment sections are especially good for sites which the author doesn't update, so you can read the correction in the comment.
There were sometimes helpful corrections, but those came largely through email anyway, and, since I update the articles when I receive a correction, the corrective comments instantly became obsolete.
I just remembered the biggest reason why I removed comments: Spam. The added value wasn't significant enough (due to the reasons above) to warrant spending the time I spent removing span comments. Make a popular post and you'll get a whole bunch of "What a great post! Check out my thing: <thing>". I didn't want to spend more time moderating so I just disabled comments.