As some of you might know, this site has no com­ment system. Many people wonder why I disable it when Word­press has a great com­ment system—all I need to do is just style it—ready to be use.

No More House­keeping

As Kroc Camen puts it “Public com­ment threads just encour­age people to write a lot of words, and say noth­ing.”, and I do agree with that. When it comes to blog com­ments on the web, most of them are use­less. There are too many com­ments like “Great post, keep up the work!” & “This is a stupid post” that does noth­ing but clutter up the com­ment thread.

Some say having a community in­spires debate, but what I mainly observe is through the power of Inter­net anonymity, it mostly in­spires hit-and-run com­ments. Unintelligent, sense­less spams that in the end requires the site owner to do reg­ular house­keeping is a waste of time. Wast­ing time of the site owner where he or she could use that time to write a quality article.

It In­spires Debate

Quality rebuttals, the ones that results in quality exchange of ideas. It is one thing to post meaning­less com­ment on some­one’s blog, it is an­oth­er when you argue your points with your readers watch­ing. When oth­er people are looking you, its hard­er to make a fool of your­self. Who doesn’t care of their own rep­u­tation, especially those who have many readers fol­lowing and judging ev­ery­thing you type.

One example of this is when Kroc Camen linked one of my post. His com­ments was constructive, leav­ing me reflecting on some of the poor choic­es I made. It is no shame in be­ing told you are wrong, in fact I would ap­preciate it more when people points out what I’ve done wrong. How else can one be right with­out be­ing wrong?

Show What You Want To Show

Take this site for example, this website be­longs to me, it is written for people that wants to read my site. When my vis­itors vis­its my site, I expect them to read what I write. What I written has always been what I could to my best ability and I want my vis­itors to see what I want them to see.

That can nev­er hap­pen when the blog is bloated with com­ments. With the addition of com­ments, vis­itors that read the blog will need to skim through the con­tent and decide which con­tent is worth the look and which isn’t. That is noth­ing like what I imag­ine the vis­itors will need to behave when they come to this site.

What Then?

I am not here to suggest an al­ternative but people have been explor­ing differ­ent ways to bring the discus­sion elsewhere, be it with twitter or fo­rums. They all have their strengths and weak­nesses.

As for me I pre­fer the good old fash­ion email. It is been around longer than I have and it has served the people on the web quite well. Those who absolutely must get their com­ments out of their chest can email me. Those who just want to say hi can email me. Those who wants to inform me of their rebuttal can email me.