Yesterday John Gruber started a firestorm of sorts with yet another post on Daring Fireball talking about why Gruber does not have a comment system. A lot of very popular and smart bloggers have responded, of them I think Shawn Blanc hits the nail on the head.
Blanc:
In a way, the DF Linked List is the comments. And it’s extremely moderated and painstakingly curated.
Of course those of us who post linked lists (like this blog does) does not allow comments from other users, but rather we are commenting on other people’s works, good or bad.
Marco Arment chimes in with:
Those who truly want to start a discussion usually have their own blogs, so they can write their commentary to their audience. If it’s a Tumblr reblog, I’ll see it and read it. If it’s an external link and they email me with the link, or they make a corresponding Twitter post mentioning “marcoarment” or “Marco Arment” or a URL containing “marco.org” or any short URL resolving to something that contains “marco.org”, I’ll see it and read it.
Of course you can always just go by what the original linked list king Gruber has to say on the matter:
What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.