Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

I have worked with bloggers and news sites over the last 2 years, and are some things I have learned:

* Comments give a better sense of the your audience. Take Youtube for example. When you see comments in a video, you know what kind of audience that channel has, and what the audience like. Same for blogs. * Comments give new visitors an idea how good/bad your blog post is. For example, take a programming tutorial. When there are comments about the article, you can make a better decision whether you should use the code examples in your application. Don't forget that stackoverflow is built on user comments. People are not going to search the article you shared on Twitter to find out comments. (If you only share on Twitter/HN, make sure to link the Twitter/HN discussion at the bottom, like Cloudflare blog does) * Comments let you build your own audience, which you own. Just think, what happens when Twitter bans you?

However,

* When new bloggers do not get comments from their audience, they become discouraged. I have seen people really excited about starting their new blog and adding our commenting system, and they just say after a few weeks, they just remove comments from their blog because they don't get comments. The fact is that getting comments on your blog is harder than getting a comment on social media. The obvious reason is that the user has to "signup".

Okay, so what if make commenting easier? For example, just with username. So, we make commenting public. It works fine until you are flooded with spam comments. Tools like Akismet do a good job on detecting spam. The real problem comes when people start to publish non-spam but not-so-good comments on your blog. This is when you need moderating... manual moderating. It requires time.

Finally, to answer your question: Are blog comments a thing of the past? It is a decision of the blogger. Some like to have public discussions, but some like to have it in Twitter DMs or emails. Some don't care about moderating but some do. From my experience, most news sites I worked with REALLY care about their commenting section, and they invest a lot in software and moderation teams to have nice, engaging conversations on their websites.

That cuts down on the automated spammers, and allows people who are actively following me (not so many people I expect) to offer feedback.

In the past I'd get five-ten comments on a post, these days maybe 1 at the most. It seems like few people comment, either that means nobody reads, or people have no complaints/updates to offer. It is a bit hard to tell.

I tend to post about debian, golang, parsers, and similar random things https://blog.steve.fi/

I have a "strictly technical" SWE blog with approximately 4k to 8k users per month, which I have been maintaining it for 3/4 years.

I use Disqus for comments. I virtually have no spam (if I had some, it's been so little that I don't remember it). The comments are generally good quality (some even improved the articles), possibly due to the nature of the blog, but they're few.

If spamming and low quality comments are due to open comment systems, I'd still stick with a closed system like Disqus, as I prefer fewer but more motivated comments.

On a funny note, it took me a while to find out that Disqus introduced taboola ads at some point, because I use ad blockers. The moment I found out, I was so horrified that I thought somebody hacked the blog and panicked; it took me a bit to figure out what actually happened :)

Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior.

If you have something substantive to say, respond in a blog post of your own.

If you have something personal to say, send an email. This is scary and intimate, but also permits you to actually talk to a person without the performative aspect of doing it in public.