My experience with comments on my site has not been great. My general sense is that, beyond the occasional "thank you", which I appreciate but which is not very actionable, the best discourse happened by email anyway, and comments were mostly by people who wanted me to solve their problems for them.
I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.
I just remembered an important detail but I can't edit my parent comment to update: The reason I disabled comments was that I got lots of spam, and it wasn't worth spending time removing the spam comments for the few useful ones I got.
It wouldn't be HN if there wasn't a comment pointing out why the whole project is useless. I for one appreciate there being a lightweight alternative to proprietary, locked-in, cloud based services like Disqus, even if I don't personally and currently need a comment field on my website.
Don’t forget that Disqus is also a major tracking service, not as prevalent as Facebook buttons but with more semi legitimate functionality so you lose more if you block it.
If we're discussing semantics then you are correct, the literal word "useless" was never used, but it's obvious that the point of the comment is to state that there is -- in the end -- no need for this solution as more primitive solutions are already superior. This is a type of comment that is so common that it's a trope in itself, much more than the calling out of it is (as some here seems to argue).
It wouldn't be hacker news if there wasn't eventually a comment pointing out that there's always a comment pointing out <x>.
It's fascinating to see this happen on both HN and Reddit, quite often even before 'comment pointing out <x>' is even posted.
This phenomenon reminds me a bit of the annoying fallacy-fallacy, or how any discussion involving -isms (capitalism, socialism) cannot be had without either or both parties pre-emptively defending against being accused of, say, the no-true-scotsman fallacy.
I've been wondering if this is a 'new' thing, or if we've always been having these increasingly meta conversations, or if perhaps I'm just getting old and tired of it.
On this note, what are some examples of comments providing considerable value?
I can think of: comments in torrent trackers, where comments sometimes provide useful information; and, if this even counts, forum sites, like Reddit or HN, where comments host discussions.
Like children commenters said, comments are very useful if there's a community around your site. For my personal blog, comments were mostly "thanks" and sometimes angry comments about how I didn't like the thing they liked, although these were rare.
There were sometimes helpful corrections, but those came largely through email anyway, and, since I update the articles when I receive a correction, the corrective comments instantly became obsolete.
I just remembered the biggest reason why I removed comments: Spam. The added value wasn't significant enough (due to the reasons above) to warrant spending the time I spent removing span comments. Make a popular post and you'll get a whole bunch of "What a great post! Check out my thing: <thing>". I didn't want to spend more time moderating so I just disabled comments.
I think comments provide value everywhere where there is a community. If you don't have a community around your website and only random strangers visit it, it won't offer considerable value. Although I cannot say that I have a community around my blog, I occasionally get useful comments with clarifying questions and additional information which helps me improve my content.
For blog-posts which contains technical how-to information, the comments often contain corrections or other additional information which may be relevant for later releases or other distros.
Yes, this is one example of useful comments. It's just that, for my site, those tended to be over email, which I generally respond to immediately, so it's equivalently useful.
Comment sections are especially good for sites which the author doesn't update, so you can read the correction in the comment.
I made my email address even more prominent and disabled comments on my site after realizing it would be a net improvement.