Agreed - I think mentions are a very cool in principle, but in practice it seems like blog software that supports them tends to just treat them as comments, which ends up being really irritating. Unfortunately this practice has been sort of solidified by platforms like Tumblr.

I would love to see mentions implemented in the UX as a completely separate concept from comments, where there is independently maybe a "mentioned x times" in the post footer which can be clicked for a list of mentioners. This could be a cool method for "webring-style" discovery of websites on similar topics without cluttering up the comment experience.

I don't display pingbacks anywhere on my website, but I like to know when people link to articles I've written. It's personally rewarding for me to know that I'm contributing knowledge that others are referencing and expanding on. These have opened project collaborations for me and allowed me to meet some awesome new like-minded friends from all over.

I generally agree posting these on your site is going to be sloppy and probably lead to getting spam'd or end up with backlink issues.

It’s like something between Twitter reply and quoted RT, which both shows up for your own followers and notifies the OP you said something about their topic. Before big social networks were popular, this was a very good way to make new friends on the internet.

Don't think of it as comments on blog posts, think of it as enabling entire conversation threads between websites instead of between twitter accounts.

As a reader, I find clicking through the mentions / pingback links are a good way to find another take on the same subject as the original article