Comments on Blogs
VC has just started allowing comments. Here’s the comment I posted there on that:
I encourage you to edit (that is, delete– not revise) vigorously. Usually comments on popular blogs are a waste because such a large percentage are of low quality compared with the blog entries themselves. Tell commenters that half of them won’t make it, and readers will be much more likely to read the remaining half. That will encourage the high-quality commenters, and discourage the low-quality commenters, a good thing.
My blog doesn’t edit much (I think I’ve deleted for bad language once, maybe), but that’s because I get so few comments (though today I made the anti-spam filter laxer, to make making comments easier). Comments *can* be a great addition to a blog, potentially better than the blog itself, but the big blogs attract too many cranks and mediocrities who have nothing new to say, and people stop reading the comment pages.