Are comments dead?

Anyone who happens to look at my site frequently will notice I don’t get all that many comments. That’s never really bothered me; I write on my blog as a release and to hopefully help those few people that manage to find something useful.

Yet there are many who when coming to redesign or rebuild their blogs are removing the facility to add comments to their posts. Instead they attempt to push the discussion to somewhere external of their site; like Twitter. There are two glaringly obvious problems with this:

1. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise 140 characters simply isn’t enough to have a half decent conversation. Instead you end up with half meanings and no elaboration of your point of view.
2. The discussion is also restricted to two people and the few that happen to follow both these people. Any others are instantly exiled from a conversation they have no idea is even occurring.

There are a few reasons I can think of for people to remove comments from their website but on the whole they all seem fairly selfish. At no point can I find a situation where removing comments helps those that would otherwise be using them. Sure it’s the site owner’s prerogative to do what they wish with their own site but it seems against the spirit of having a blog if instead of trying to foster a discussion on the topic you’ve written about you instead kill it even before it begins.

I hope this trend I’ve begun to see is limited to only a few and that this doesn’t become the norm as even if you’re site gets only a few comments like mine I’m sure people appreciate the opportunity to add their view.