Comments on my blog entries are disabled. And they stay disabled, for now.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want you to comment on my blog postings. Should you even want to, is another matter. Let me explain.

I read my share of blogs, and the single most irritating thing about them is the comments that people make. I mean, it’s all about the participation in principle, but many, if not most, of the comments are utter nonsense, fluff, and superfluous. Of course it depends on the topic of the blog, on its admin, frequency of moderation, and many other things, but that seems to be the norm. It’s not just personal blogs; there is a disturbing trend with news sites to let people comment on actual news releases, and it’s a really rare occasion when people, given the chance, have something constructive and useful to say.

I admit I’m old skool in that I still tend to view most media as unidirectional. Television sure is, although I don’t care much for TV. But traditional books and magazines are that, too — I can’t comment on the latest paperback I read and adorn it with some facetious remark. (BTW, Amazon’s user reviews are mostly crap, too. Sorry.) It would take a major change in human nature to make me allow comments on my blog entries. I’m also saving myself a lot of aggravation and moderation, because I’ve seen many neglected blog entries full of actual spam. I wouldn’t want to clean up the debris that some spambot left behind, let alone decide if a comment was worth keeping or not.

People misuse the comments on blogs horribly, not just by writing inane and clueless things, but also by asking questions from the author, or other commenters, even though a dedicated discussion forum for that might exist just nearby. Of course, questions like “how did you achieve what you wrote about?” are semi-smart, but questions like “I installed this software on my mother-in-law’s PC, and now it doesn’t work anymore, can you help me?” are just out of context and dumb.

So, the bottom line is I simply don’t trust you enough to make rational comments. That is why comments are disabled. Tough luck. Myself, I do comment on some blogs, but I try to keep it constructive. And I wouldn’t mind if comments were disabled, because I’ve rarely been able to educate the poster anyway. So it’s basically a waste of time. Yours, too.

(BTW, if you feel the urge to drop me a line, I’m sure you can figure out my e-mail address. Use it if you must.)