I see people recommending commenting systems here, but have we stopped to consider whether we need comments at all?
My personal experience is that comments are usually content-thin, and not worth reading. I publish my email address prominently, and people who want to tell me something do take the time to email me, and I enjoy the more personal conversation over email as well.
This depends heavily on the website in question and how well the comments are moderated/curated. The Online Photographer [0] is my goto example of a blog where the comments are excellent (and a key part of the value gained from visiting the site). The trick in this case: every comment goes through a moderation queue before it's posted. Some then get featured as part of the article.
I think for communities like HN, the real content actually is the comments-- or rephrased, HN uniquely stands out amongst other news aggregators because of its community. You could say the community sentiment should be reflected through the content submitted, but I just don’t believe that’s true.
However, I don’t think everything on earth needs comments. I honestly never understood the point of blog posts having comments, but I’ve never run a successful blog that anyone looks at either so maybe I don’t get it.
Agreed, and communities don't outsource their comments. It seems to me that things like Disqus aren't useful, since if you use a third party service for your comments, they're mostly an afterthought and could well be omitted.
Comments help fixing issues in a decentralized way, which is awesome. They also help develop stickiness, like HN (or addiction if you fall into dopamine addiction). Youtube would never be popular without the comments, which help criticize the video and get other viewpoints.
But it seems they aren’t valuable _enough_ that someone would develop a browser extension to comment on any webpage —or, since such extensions have been tried a lot actually, that people would actually use them.
My personal experience is that comments are usually content-thin, and not worth reading. I publish my email address prominently, and people who want to tell me something do take the time to email me, and I enjoy the more personal conversation over email as well.