I noticed that the Stripe blog doesn't allow comments. I think most people find it odd or frustrating when they can't add their 2 cents to something (for better or for worse!). Any idea which things might have driven this decision?
- Not wanting to deal with how most people act on the net? (Or maybe they're in a highly competitive space where the juggernauts wouldn't think twice about trying to destroy their image.)
- To encourage people who want to discuss the blog entry to submit it to their favorite discussion communities?
- To avoid possible PR issues sitting right on their company's blog? (Related to point #1)
There is a kind of beautiful simplicity to the page that comments would probably destroy.
I made the same decision on my personal blog. When there are comments both on a blog and here on HN, the conversation feels unnaturally fragmented to me.
Further, when I did have both, comments that self-selected the blog (vs HN) are - in my opinion - much more likely to be spam/promotional, or generally less 'valuable' (e.g. more likely to be simple questions that are already answered in the post).
There's an angle I hadn't considered. The spammy and promotional type of comments would be far more likely to appear directly on the blog since that's where the value (for the commenter) is in leaving them. That's something that moderated comments would control, but you can't moderate your way out of fragmentation.
I would expect more negative comments to be left directly on the blog as well since the commenter won't have to deal with the potential backlash from their community. Which is probably also a good reason to never allow any kind of anonymous of guest comments. (Although that wouldn't stop the truly motivated negative commenters.)
Moderation can also get tricky. Pure spam is simple but you will run into comments where the commenter somehow works in their (product || experience). So long as they provided some commentary it is not pure spam. So the situation becomes a bit touchy.
This is a problem we ran into at PhpPhotoUploadr. In our case we have a very talented team so we hacked together a solution.
I also thought about it. Think about your blog - your posts can be: articles, essays, discussions. I chose essay, and removed comments. In a sense:
"This is what I have to say, I've wrote it and re-written it, and reformulated it and I think its good for publishing. I then published it and if you have comments, send me an Email and I'll consider amending my post".
I noticed that the Stripe blog doesn't allow comments. I think most people find it odd or frustrating when they can't add their 2 cents to something (for better or for worse!). Any idea which things might have driven this decision?
- Not wanting to deal with how most people act on the net? (Or maybe they're in a highly competitive space where the juggernauts wouldn't think twice about trying to destroy their image.)
- To encourage people who want to discuss the blog entry to submit it to their favorite discussion communities?
- To avoid possible PR issues sitting right on their company's blog? (Related to point #1)
There is a kind of beautiful simplicity to the page that comments would probably destroy.