The People Have Spoken, Damn Them

Whenever I am mildly tempted to enable comments, I always fire up the Yahoo! news site. That always cures me.

I rely on the Yahoo! site for the bulk of the krill flow of news that I feed on. But reading the comments reminds me that there are a lot of really stupid, hateful, and paranoid people out there. And I have no desire to provide one more bit of real estate for them to spout on.

Relying on email for feedback has resulted in much higher quality comments.

Anyway, if you've wondered why I don't have comments, that's one big part of my reasoning.

The second is that I don't want the time suck of patrolling the comments to respond to comments, delete for idiocy or hate, or watch for spam.

And third, I don't want to be trapped by commenters. Sure, I see lots of idiot commenters on other sites, but that isn't the real danger of comments. The real danger is from people who like what you write. I think it is too easy to be seduced by positive commenters into tailoring posts to appeal to commenters. I try to offer accurate thoughts on events based on what I think, and I think that could be endangered with comments.

So there you go. If you're curious.