First, I think a blog post ending with "bring on the flames" should have comments enabled, otherwise it's not really fair. It comes across as whining without wa

First, I think a blog post ending with "bring on the flames" should have comments enabled, otherwise it's not really fair. It comes across as whining without wanting to listen to advice or a response. Speaking as someone who sometimes writes controversial things and never enables comments on my posts... I view collections of comments as discussions. Readers often form into communities, like Hacker News. If there are comments on a blog post, are you supposed to write your comment here in your community? Or there on the post? Well, a good question is, are you a member of the author’s community? Probably not! Communities have all sorts of standards for participation. What are the author’s standards? Why bother figuring them out for one comment? Communities also have other tools like seeing a person's history of posts to get a sense of their viewpoint and biases. How do you do that on an author’s blog? Ultimately, authors either have to get rid of comments or buy into a plug-in system like Disqus. In my own case, I usually just provide a link to HN for posts that I think are of interest to the folks here. Everyone else can use twitter, reddit, or their own blogs to continue the discussion. That doesn’t mean I won’t read all the flames, there are no end of analytics tools for discovering what people are saying about my writing. I don’t speak for this author, but considering he has a link to this discussion right at the top of his post, I’m guessing he’s listening to your thoughts and welcomes your feedback right here or wherever people congregate to discuss the news of the day.