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Why not have the best of both worlds? If you really have something to say that's important, lengthy, and worthy of the reflection of your readers, put it in an "essays" section of your site where comments are disabled and link to it in a blog post in the "blog" section, where comments are enabled. People who are only interested in your thoughts will read the essay and then leave. People who want to participate in the discussion can go to the blog post and do so there.

The "comments are noise" attitude presumes most comments have nothing valuable to add (which may be true to various degrees, depending on your readership). But this is a judgment coming from the author's perspective. The comments may be noise to him or her, but might be very valuable to other readers. Even if they seem to discuss tangential minutiae.

I agree with Joel. Before blogs emerged, there were plenty of websites where people opined on various things without feedback from the readers. The expectation that most people have when they go to a blog is that there will be some level of interaction with the author and other readers.

A blog post is pretty much a sermon even if you have a little box where people can leave "comments." That's part of why blogs are amazing. Sermons aren't bad. People discuss sermons. Sermons don't happen in a vacuum, even if you don't have the little comment box. People can discuss whereever they want. Like here.

If discussions had to add significant value, the world would be a very quiet place.

Noise can have social value. Half the comments on HN have little value on their own, but they create a sense of community, a sense of place and belonging. They're part of the identity of a platform. How many of us would care much about HN if it was just links and anonymous votes? There wouldn't be an "us" to begin with, and without an "us", who cares about HN?

Perhaps a different form of commenting is needed. Instead of showing all comments to everyone, the article author sees all, while the commenter only sees their own. Potentially, the article author could 'promote' worthwhile comments, and allow full discussion threads - on a separate page.

The point of this would be to allow personal discussion with the author, but spam and driveby comments would be discouraged.

I'm sure this must've been tried somewhere?

Comments sections improve blogs because they are a place where readers can point out errors in the parent article.

Sending an email or tweeting the correction is more difficult than making an anonymous comment, and would then need the author to both concede their mistake and take the time to correct the article. Until they do that, everyone who reads the article risks being misinformed.

I can see an argument that comment areas are less necessary on purely opinion blog posts like this one, but on technical blogs they are much more useful, and even on opinion posts I think giving space for dissent is probably a good general rule to follow. For example James Shakespeare seems to base his opinion on the belief that everyone has the same "blog reading algorithm", which I don't think is the case. If there were a comments section I'd post that suggestion, but because of the increased overhead/social investment needed to send an email or tweet I'm not going to bother, and he will probably never read that dissenting opinion.

> It’s the equivalent of reaching the end of a book and having a mob of other readers immediately descend on you, everyone trying to make their review heard above the fray.

But when you reach the end of a book (and if you liked it), the first thing to do is seek out others' opinions of and discussion of the book, right? It's the same with TV shows; as soon as it's over (on a weekly schedule), people naturally want to discuss it at twop or tvtropes' forum or whatever. Making that discussion easy on your own site just streamlines the process.

I do like the idea of the "discuss this post on Hacker News" links you see sometimes. Because some articles are worth discussing, but usually not on some random blog - the point is the audience wants to discuss the article with each other. A blog's audience can be huge or tiny and there is no way to know if the effort of posting a comment is going to be worth it unless you are quite familiar with the blog already, and commenting on a remote site allows you to much more effectively monitor responses and engage with a familiar audience.

Comment sections on high-traffic news sites such as the BBC perplex me. I go to the BBC to read the BBC news, not people's rants. The sheer volume of comments (hundreds or even thousands) on popular articles there makes the facility next to useless. It is the definition of "the drive-by argument!"

I think that sites like Hacker News, Reddit and Facebook are much better for promoting discussion of articles. A problem with comments on blogs is that it's difficult to generate a community.

If you look on any large site that has comments (like The Verge, or YouTube) the comments always descend into jokes and memes.

By posting this article on Hacker News, a discussion has formed and it follows the rules laid out by the Hacker News community, there wont be much name calling or inane jokes.

I never bother to read the comments when I read a blog. Don't care. I get to have discussions here and on Facebook, etc. Blog comments sections are just not used by enough total people (like HN), nor enough people that I actually know (like FB), to be an interesting place to have a discussion, most of the time.

And another side benefit of disabling comments is that it eliminates the need to moderate and filter out botspam for fake Rolexes and herbal supplements for "male enhancement."

I strongly disagree, and honestly, I hate the trend of "blog comments are evil!" that networks like Svbtle and Medium are perpetuating.

Yes, the comment systems of major blogs such as Engadget and TechCrunch are filled with filth. (disclosure: I gained my fame/infamy through the TechCrunch comments section). That's when the GIFT and Law of Large Numbers meet, and it isn't pretty.

But high quality content yields high quality content. Articles that are insightful, like analyses that hit the top of HN, don't attract stupidity. Playing curation games with your comments (such as Gawker's "we hide all your comments unless we like you.") alienate your users, and it is somewhat selfish from the author's perspective.

A good compromise is Facebook Comments, which discourages trolls who aren't willing to be anonymous. It doesn't eliminate them, but it's a very strong start, and easy to implement.

It's a little ironic that by not supporting comments/discussion on the page directly they have been outsourced to HN. People will talk about you whether you're in the room or not...

At a hackathon I built a simple blog system that let one reply to the authors article's individual paragraphs privately and provided a private RSS feed to the commenter for the author to continue a conversation.

The idea being that an anonymous intelligent conversation is possible but the author is probably the most informed on a subject and therefore should be the judge on what is considered good content.

Not sure I entirely agree with this for all cases. One example of a blog post where comments are highly valuable is a highly technical/tutorial style post (be it about coding, mathematics etc.)

Often with articles of this nature, the comments serve as a very swift mechanism to get corrections and bug fixes back to the author - improving the quality of the post for future readers.

Interesting. There is a particular art to fostering a culture of discussion, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying that the signal got drowned out in the noise in most comment threads. And some threads are more enlightening and entertaining than the article above them. Depends on the comment thread.

The blog is the comment.

You want to comment on the comment? Do it on your blog.

Not notable enough, nobody will see it? My heart bleeds for you.

Tumblr gets this right.

Exactly what I did with my own blog. My reasons are more technical though and I still suggest user he can mail me if he want to discuss anything.

For all the talk about the design and user behaviors. The author uses some kind of pseudo-highlighting to indicate links. I would not of figured that out if the highlighting pattern didn't match that Wikipedia style so often used.

preachy articules add no value. comments add a lot to a whole lot of articles, just not preachy ones

tldr: author is too lazy to moderate comments