Blog Comments are Dead

Here’s one random observation - (almost) nobody comments directly on blog posts these days. It seems that all the conversations happen somewhere else - Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, Facebook, you name it.

My blogs always had commenting turned on, but I rarely got any comments, even on blog posts that generated a lot of visits. Sometimes I’d see 100+ comments on Reddit for some article and 3 comments under the article itself. I guess the situation was different 10 years ago, but I don’t remember that time very well. At any rate - I think social media changed the rules of engagement when it comes to sharing feedback.

I’ve really started to wonder if today one needs to bother to setup something like Hyvor Talk, Disqus, or whatever, on their blog. After I switched my blog from Hydeout to Minimal Mistakes, I’ve decided to disable the comments completely. I’m just too lazy to spend time trying to figure out how to use Hyvor Talk with Minimal Mistakes, knowing that few people will likely use it, and I dislike Disqus too much to take the easy way out and go back to using it.

Another observation - some blogging platforms (e.g. HEY World) don’t even support comments, and many people using platforms like Wordpress, turn off commenting for their blogs. My guess - the comments that many people get on their blogs are not of the constructive variety, so they are better off without them.

Blog comments are dead. And that’s fine. Less is more.