Language Log recently opened up comments on a post about the origins of a girl’s name. One of the commenters wrote:
Comments are great. I also vote that you get Captcha/reCaptcha, because without comments a blog is…nothing.
How wrong can you be? On a blog with a smallish readership, I agree, comments make the conversation. But with thousands of readers, Sturgeon’s Revelation or another of those all-purpose rules takes over. Easy access certainly killed the comments on the Freakonomics blog stone dead. I’m not being elitist here. I’ll happily read the posts. but I’ll also forego the comments, unless they are closely moderated. I quite like the approach one of the photo blogs takes, to have a featured comment or two. It is a lot of work, but worth it.