During that time, I wrote a total of 2,995 posts, with a total of 9,079 comments across the lot, and I think I had a grand total of five negative comments.

The problem that I have with any current debate about the integrity or value of comments on a blog, is that in the entire fifteen years since the notion of blogging first emerged on the fledgling interwebs, the standard idea of what a comment is hasn't changed one iota.

Comments are always displayed as afterthoughts, with no integral link back to the content above them. The 'add your comment' form acts like a monumental full stop to the piece -- the author essentially pasting their opinion up as if it was a proclamation on a stage, and then skulking into the stalls with the rest of the audience to participate in a 'discussion' (if they do that at all -- most simply walk away and choose not to engage with the Hoi polloi).

It strikes me as practically medieaval, this notion of the article as the definitive declaration of opinion -- especially in an age and a medium where everything is constantly in motion. Far better, I always thought, to regard the posting of an article as the opening of a conversation -- a conversation that incorporates the opinions and viewpoints of your readers in a way that allows yourself to be questioned, and gives you a direct way to answer those questions.

...

For the record, the way mine used to work (and would still work on that neglected current implementation of mine, were I in the mood for having a conversation again), was that instead of herding all the comments after I'd posted something into a separate database, they got inserted into the main body of the text (and converted into an avatar + speech bubble by some nifty regex). There was no end to each of the posts -- if someone commented on one then I'd just pick up where I left off and reply to them. It was a continuous conversation, rather than a series of statements followed by an unruly debate.

The point I'm trying to make, isn't that I think my little system was anything approaching a solution to the current state of internet commenting -- it took a huge effort on my part to curate the conversation, and was exhausting and frustrating at times -- it's that simple declarations of "Comments = good!" and "Comments = bad!" fail to grasp the opportunities that our new myriad of communication tools have given us.