After blogging here for over eight years, I’ve decided to switch off comments.
Its clear that there are many ways to keep track of comments now, especially with social networks. I thought that implementing Disqus would help. But when your blog post reaches Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and it gets its own individual comment stream, it gets really difficult to keep track of where the conversation is any longer. I also get a lot of comments via email, which I get too much of to begin with. As I get busier, I certainly have less time to respond to comments anyway.
Surprisingly, disabling comments had nothing to do with spam. Akismet has been taking care of that quite well for the many years it has been used. I probably miss a few good comments here and there (because I never check the spam queue), but thats ok.
Something to sync comments across all social networks might be cool. I’ve yet to see that yet.