I don’t tend to comment on things from Jason Kottke, simply because by the time I get to reading his entries they’re well covered. But this was a very interesting discussion of why the top tier (i.e. high traffic) bloggers don’t tend to have comments turned on with their blogs.
If you’re wondering why the comments on kottke.org aren’t on more often, this is the reason.[1] This site is a one-person operation and even though I work on it full-time, I don’t have the throughput to manage a lot of threads. Comment gardening (as I call it) is hard work if you want to maintain an appropriate level of discourse. And as Xeni said, the current technological and user experience solutions suck. Approved commenting, sign-in to comment, Slashdot-like comment moderation…they all have their problems.
Completely understandable.
