I didn't know I cared

[dsrtao]

I just unsubscribed from an RSS feed of a blog that I frequently enjoy. Why? Because I wanted to make a comment, went to the blog, and discovered that the author had decided to turn off commenting. This strikes me as so antithetical to my conception of what a blog is -- a microcommunity -- that I felt disgusted, and stopped reading.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I honestly disagree -- while I find blogs much more *interesting* if they allow comments (and even moreso if they really grok the community idea), I don't think they're nearly as central to the idea as you seem to. I think you're being a bit LJ-parochial here: comments are *way* less central to most blogs than they are to LJ. Indeed, I'd say that it's unusual, on average, for bloggers on non-LJ systems to curate their community with any care.

In this particular case I can understand the charge of hypocrisy -- at the least, it sounds like this guy doesn't understand community as well as he thinks. But in the general case I don't have a fundamental problem with a comment-free blog: I simply take it into account when deciding whether or not to bother following it.

(Heck, even on LJ my feelings vary from person to person. There are people for whom I always read their comment threads, because they foster particularly interesting conversations, and others who never seem to get very interesting responses but whose posts are well worth reading, so I just don't bother to follow the comments...)