Allowing or disallowing comments on blogs

Mar 19, 2014 - Coding Horror - Please Read The Comments

In 2006 I said that a blog without comments is not a blog and I stand behind that statement.

Since no official standard exists to define a "blog," the above sentiment is obviously personal, which makes sense because an individual blog is personal.

A blog with comments is a blog, and a blog without comments is also a blog. And I stand behind that statement.

More from Atwood's March 2014 post:

I'm a fan of comments, warts and all. They're noisy, sure, but in my experience they reliably produce crowdsourced knowledge in aggregate.

... if you are unwilling to moderate your online community, you don't deserve to have an online community.

True, but not all blogs are designed to be online communities.

However, demanding that every online community, every comment section, have active moderation is a tough sell.

One of the reasons I launched the Discourse project was due to the utter lack of understanding of how you build software to help online discussion communities moderate themselves. Their survival depends on it.

Discourse is new message board software not a blog tool.

What I learned building Stack Overflow, more than anything else, is this: the only form of moderation that scales with the community is the community itself.

http://stackoverflow.com is a