Comments have often lent life to the blogsphere. Blogs like DailyKos and TPMCafe allow everyone not just to comment, but to keep personal journals. Here at TwoDems, we currently do not have enough users perhaps to be greatly concerned about this, but there are often great debates whether to allow or disallow comments. Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy (a group law blog) is one of the larger blogs I know with no comments section. He summarizes his rationale for no comments as follow as follows:

1. The first is esthetic, which sounds frivolous, but esthetics of a certain sort matters a lot to writers and editors. I feel that The Conspiracy is a coherent product that I help put together. I intentionally lack complete control over it, because of the participation of my cobloggers; and I find this esthetically pleasing (as well as functionally useful in various ways), since it lets me enjoy the pleasant surprise of interesting things being posted that I couldn’t have even thought of posting. But that’s so because I have a very high opinion of my cobloggers, and have tried to select them based on their quality.

It would annoy me a lot if this coherent product also included some postings that I very much dislike, from people whom I never explicitly invited. Even if people didn’t think less of me for those postings, it would still bother me. Maybe this isn’t entirely rational; many esthetic preferences aren’t rational. But it is pretty strongly felt, as are many writers’ and editors’ views about “their babies.”

2. The second is reputational. Rightly or wrongly, consciously or not, some people’s perception of the blog and its bloggers will be molded by what the commenters post as well as by what the bloggers post. Some people will infer (not implausibly) that because (A) some dreck is posted, (B) I have the power to delete it, and (C) I don’t delete it, therefore (D) I must agree with it or at least not entirely disagree with it.

3. And this brings us to the third, eminently practical reason. I’m swamped as it is, and I don’t have the time to deal with all this. “What time?,” people ask. “Just enable them and leave them be.” Yeah, right. Someone is going to start spamming the comments with ads for penis enhancement. Someone else is going to start a flamewar. Some jerk is going to decide that he violently disagrees with me — or, worse yet, that he agrees with me — and chooses to express himself in terms that are hard to just ignore. As I mentioned in the second point, the reputation of the blog will indeed be on the line.

The consequence will be that I’ll have to monitor the comments in some measure, which means a good deal of hassle — not just time-consuming work, since that’s often fun, but time-consuming hassle and obligation. That seems like something I’d much rather avoid right now.

Tyler Cowen experimened back in September with opening comments on various posts on Marginal Revolution. He learned 1, that comments increase page views and visits but not terribly usefully, 2, that keeping comments open too regularly dilutes them of value, and 3, that people are more helpful on questions like good chinese restaurants or continuity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer than the merits of evolution and intelligent design.

This all came out of a NYTimes The Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago Law School. I find that the community-type blogs like the ones above have the most useless comments whereas blog such (such as Crooked Timber, Matthew Yglesias, Daniel Drezner, etc. have smaller comments sections that prove useful.

Mostly I think it is related to size and blog goal. For now, and I imagine until we have more than 10,000 hits a day, I forsee our comments section being quite secure.