The web has a weird history with comments. I have a book called Zero Comments, a critique of blog culture from 2008. It opens by quoting from a 2005 post from a now defunct website, stodge.org. The Wayback Machine does not capture the original post, so here is the quote as lifted from the book:
In the world of blogging ‘0 Comments’ is an unambiguous statistic that means absolutely nobody cares. The awful truth about blogging is that there are far more people who write blogs than who actually read blogs.
Hmm. If somebody comments on your blog, it means that they care about what you’re saying. What’s the correct thing to do to people who care about your output? In 2011, the answer was to push them away:
It’s been a very difficult decision (I love reading comments on my articles, and they’re almost unfailingly insightful and valuable), but I’ve finally switched comments off.
I experimented with Comments Off, then ultimately turned them back on in 2014:
having comments switched off dilutes the experience for those people who did want to see what people were talking about. There’d be some chat over on twitter (some of which mentions me, some of which doesn’t), and some over on the blog’s Facebook page. Then people will mention the posts on their favourite forums like Reddit, and a different conversation would happen over there. None of that will stop with comments on, and I wouldn’t want to stop it. Having comments here should guide people, without forcing them, to comment where everyone can see them.
This analysis still holds. People comment on my posts over at Hacker News and similar sites, whether I post them there or not. The sorts of comments that you would expect from Hacker News commenters, therefore, rarely appear here. They appear there. I can’t stop that. I can’t discourage it. I can merely offer an alternative.
In 2019 people talk about the Ratio:
While opinions on the exact numerical specifications of The Ratio vary, in short, it goes something like this: If the number of replies to a tweet vastly outpaces its engagement in terms of likes and retweets, then something has gone horribly wrong.
So now saying something that people want to talk about, which in 2005 was a sign that they cared, is a sign that you messed up. The goal is to say things that people don’t care about, but will uncritically share or like. If too many people comment, you’ve been ratioed.
I don’t really have a “solution”: there may be human solutions to technical problems, but there aren’t technical solutions to human problems. And it seems that the humans on the web have a problem that we want an indication that people are interested in what we say, but not too much of an indication, or too much interest.
