Seth Godin switched the comments off. What's the reaction been? Well, I hate to say it, but very, very negative. Kent Newsome, for instance, has described it as "faux agoraphobia". Mathew Ingram has pointed out Godin's apparent hypocrisy because of his involvement in both the Cluetrain and because Seth's "how to promote your blog" post included advice to people to use comments. 
I have to respectfully disagree. Though I have comments on most of my titled entries, I do so somewhat reluctantly.
I don't like blog comments. They're an unfortunate anachronism. RSS is a superb piece of technology which allows me to see what people are writing on their blogs automatically. There is no easy way of keeping track of comments like there is with links. Links get crawled by Technorati, comments do not. I use co.mments.com, but it's a bit of an pain in the arse, to be honest. For instance, I bookmarked (co.mment.ed? ce.ment.ed?) a post that Suw made on Strange Attractor the other day. co.mments.com tells me when there's a response, but it doesn't actually list the comment in the response, so I have to click back through to the site to see what it is. The co.mments.com RSS feed also doesn't seem to render in my aggregator, so their page is yet another page I have to keep on my "things to keep track of" list (email, calendar, to-do list, aggregator, comments, a couple of forums and so on).
I am sure there are hundreds of thousands of good conversations going on in commentspace, but it's nearly impossible to find them, and even harder to keep track of them.
If I get a comment on my blog, it's difficult to work out what to do with it. For instance, Dave Winer posted a comment on my blog today (here). What do I do with it? I've posted a comment back saying "I'm not sure, Dave", but how do I know whether Dave has read that? It's hardly like sending an email or putting a link to someone's blog. It's really a rather difficult form to actually have a conversation in, which rather puts pay to the whole idea that comments are the most perfectest form of conversation known to man.
Comments also suffer from bad software. The linear form doesn't scale well. This means that conversations get very muddy, very quickly. There is no easy way to mark out quotations in most blog comments, while the ability to put a blockquote in is in most message board software and in blog software itself. Comment areas also have varying approaches to HTML - some allow lots of it, some allow a bit of it, some allow none of it. Some comments areas don't even allow you to use paragraphs. If what you have to say is important, I want to be able to respond properly. That means all of the tools available to me in HTML: links, quotes and paragraphs.
We need something far more robust. The conversation is complex - a point I made in my post back in march about the Conversation Garden - flat, linear threads with no ability to branch off do not mirror that conversation. Compared to that, distributed blog conversation in the "market" of conversion is far more productive.
Having to put up with trolls is not part of the "conversation" we signed up for. Having to go through thousands and thousands of comment spams isn't part of the agreement.
Starting conversations is pointless if the conversation is a pile of crap. The value I've found in blogs far outweighs the value I find in the comments. Compared to the blogs on which they are hosted, many comments are dull, uninformative, badly written and of precious little value. Look at MySpace if you want an example of this.
Like MySpace, I think that blog comments are an essentially temporary phenomenon. They have value and potential for value, but that value is undeveloped in the current form. That's why there is value in, say, a blogger pulling interesting comments out and posting them as entries in themselves. The way that some people I meet talk though, comments are an unquestionable holy cow. I've been told that when I don't have comments on, I'm "not really blogging" - it's a foregone conclusion that they are undoubtedly a good thing.
The people who are defending comments now don't seem to be rushing to hype up message boards, even though the same advantages exist with message baords, and the same failures too. What I say on my blog sits in my control, on my computer. What I say on your blog sits there only at your whim. Blog comments aren't all that people make them out to be. They're okay. That's all. Okay. Not bad. Okay in the same way that MySpace is okay. Yeah, it serves the purpose, but it causes lots of problems on the way, and should really be redesigned to function a lot better.
Take a big political blog of any denomination - Kevin Drum or LGF or $ideology_of_your_choice - and ask yourself the question: if you could get an RSS feed of the comments to all the entries of that blog, and an RSS feed of just the entries of that blog, which would have more value? I'd say the posts themselves, not the comments. And I'd say that for the 300-odd blogs I read, that would be true for most, if not all, of them. Why? Well, one of the points is selection. Look at LGF. It has, at the time of writing, six posts on the front page. There is, on average, around 2,500 comments on LGF every day. There is a lot of value in "less is more". Time and attention is a finite resource. Perhaps on a topic or story you are very passionate about you can sit there and read a couple of hundred comments, but one of the values of the blogosphere is that you can find a source which just filters out the interesting stories for you.
There are lots of good things to say about comments, but some perspective is needed. There is a balance in the argument here. There are disadvantages to comments, and there are things which need doing a lot better.
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