Early this year, a blogger, Christian Lauf, expressed dismay over my decision to remove all the comment sections in my blog.
Christian explained that he wanted to link to a blog he encountered in a comment on my post and was disappointed that the information was no longer available. I got in touch with him and sent him the comments so all was well, but his post spurred me to reflect on the merits of the comment section for a personal blog.
Bear Blog doesn’t come with a comment section and it’s by design. When I first joined Bear Blog, I was disappointed about this and immediately set up one with Cusdis1. In retrospect, I think that was more of a knee-jerk reaction because I was so used to everything online having a comment section.
While I agree with Bear Blog’s founder and Christian that the comment section is often not where nuanced discussions happen, I also believe it highly depends on the original post’s topic and the overall genre of where the original post resides.
Take the comment section of the subreddit r/AskHistorians as an example; it’s a heavily moderated subreddit that only permits nuanced and fact-based comments with proper citations. The comments there almost read like mini history research essays and are anything but short of informative and nuanced. r/OutoftheLoop and r/whatisit also came to my mind as other examples of informative comment sections that I’ve enjoyed.
In contrast, the comment section of anything related to politics is often a disaster—I’m sure no examples are needed for this one.
When I had comment sections for this blog, I didn’t receive anything outrageous or malicious, and almost all were positive and/or thoughtful. Did they add to the blog posts? Hard to say, except for the ones on my blog post about Google de-indexing my blog—I do think those were useful. Many shared similar experiences and struggles about their sites getting de-indexed by Google, while others offered speculated explanations and possible solutions. So Christian was right that when I removed the comments, “so much wisdom” was gone.
I’d also argue that comments don’t necessarily have to be nuanced or insightful for them to have value. For a personal blog like this, hearing others’ thoughts and experiences on something I care enough to write about is valuable.
The comment section of a post or an article is often a distraction for me as a reader. When reading an article on a website that I know have a comment section, like MacRumors and DP Review, I sometimes spend more time reading and thinking about the comments rather than the main post itself2. When I read blog posts without a comment section, my focus is always entirely on the post.
However, my primary rationale behind removing all comment sections on my blog was that they reminded me too much of social media—the very thing that I was trying to distance myself from by creating a personal blog on a minimalist, indie blogging platform such as Bear Blog.
When I had comment sections on my blog, I found myself frequently checking for new comments and feeling somewhat disappointed when I saw none. It almost made me feel like I was writing blog posts with the main objective to garner comments/engagement rather than self-expression—the main reason I created this blog. When I was writing blog posts, I also found myself worrying about what kind of comments the blog post might bring.
I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to feel like I was writing to an audience. I wanted to feel that readership for this blog was secondary to self-expression. I appreciate the occasional readership this blog receives, but I just need to feel that I’m writing for myself first and foremost.
. . .
It’s been over 7 months since I removed the comment section on my blog and I never regretted it. Whenever a reader truly wants to connect with me, they use my “Reply via email” link to send me a private message. I think when you write a private message to the blogger, the exchange will be inherently more personal and candid because it’s just between the two of you—at least that’s how I feel when I write reply emails to bloggers, anyways.
Some readers may only want to leave a short message (usually some nice words about the blog or the blog post) and may not feel the need for a private message, in which case my Guestbook comes in handy.
Reply via email. Subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.
I appreciate Herman Martinus, the founder of Bear Blog, for recommending a couple options and providing setup instructions despite his stance on the comment section.↩
I don’t feel this way if the comment section doesn’t have much discourse going on, though.↩
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