Post #4071861

@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz No to comment threads. There are a handful of cases where they're not terrible, but those generally involve a strong community that existed long before the blog. And even then, the signal to noise ratio is poor. A model I think works well is for the blog author to encourage private correspondence from readers, then publish occasional posts with curated, edited reader comments. That way the author incentivises good writing from commenters, and can model respectful dialogue. Then if readers start wanting to talk to each other as well as the blog author, some kind of forum software is better than shoehorning communication into comments on someone else's posts.