John Martz posted this as part of his post on why he doesn’t have Disqus comments enabled on his Tumblr.

The wonderful thing about the web is that anyone can contribute to it. If you have something to say, there are plenty of places to say it. But your right to post to someone else’s site rests with that someone else.

This is so painfully obvious, anyone who doesn’t get it must simply have an axe to grind. It’s like assuming you have the right to go inside any house you can see from the street, and pee on the carpet.

This is exactly my philosophy when it comes to trollish comments on my blog: if you shit in my living room, get the hell out of my house, and take your turd with you.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether comments are valuable at all, that is, when I’m not actively seeking feedback for my work/thoughts. I like how John puts it:

Enabling comments is ostensibly the same thing as inviting comments. Without comments, a blog is more of a collection of thoughts and images, and no longer a venue in which the author is asking, “what do you think of this?”

That empty box at the bottom of your post is an invitation.

I wonder, too, if that box isn’t there, if people are more inclined to take their thoughts about the work elsewhere: to twitter, facebook, etc.

(I could see replacing the comment box with “Talk about this on Twitter” or Facebook “like” buttons.)

This seems to me to be way more desirable than getting a blog comment on my own site: the reader is bringing the work to their own audience, saying what they want to in their own space, and maybe, just maybe, driving some of those audience eyeballs towards the work.

I liked what they had to say about comments and reader feedback:

[Interviewer]: You don’t (appear to) allow comments on your comics or your blog. How do you engage with your audience? How do you know you’re on the right track, or do you not care?

DREW: I totally appreciate feedback. We publish our email addresses, and people can Twitter at us or post on our Facebook fan pages. Having people leave comments directly on the sites just seems counterproductive. Anyone who wants to write about our work is welcome to embed our comics into their blog and talk about them, or link to them from Twitter/Facebook and post their opinion, etc. But nobody’s going to put one of my comics on their own blog and write “First” underneath it.

The idea behind comments is that you learn what your readers think of your work. A more effective way for us to measure this is to see what people are linking to on Twitter, which images get passed around blogs, what shows up on Digg/Reddit, and so on. I have no doubt that a lot of our readers are funny and write well, but like you mentioned, these people get chased out when the signal-to-noise ratio drops.

NATALIE: There’s never a space under paintings in a gallery where someone writes their opinion. When you get to the end of a book, you don’t have to see what everyone else thought of it.

It hadn’t occurred to me to read any of the comments, but of course I couldn’t resist. Most were really thoughtful and encouraging; a few were stunningly vitriolic. (I know, I know, but it’s hard to brush these things off. Artists who say they aren’t bothered by negative feedback are kidding themselves.)

My first response to some of the comments was “Wow, that’s cold,” then, “Oh, but you haven’t been listening” — and then, “Really, you speak as if I have some choice over what I write and if I have some obligation to address the things you or the average American might care about.”

There’s a whole industry devoted to writing songs pitched toward a certain demographic. All I can do is write about what I care about and hope you might relate. And if not, here are some sweet melodies. This is my life’s work and I’ve been immersed in it so long that I can’t really extract one from the other. So I kept envisioning one of those bumper stickers on the back of a semi-trailer that says, “How’s my driving? Call…” I kept thinking “How’s my living?” as if were taking suggestions.

…

I wouldn’t go so far as to say songwriters are seer-poets wired to receive transmissions from the ether, but I think we’ve all got a well that can be tapped and there follows the sort of sequencing or curating of one’s own ideas. It’s the content of that well I can’t claim responsibility for.