Why not have the best of both worlds? If you really have something to say that's important, lengthy, and worthy of the reflection of your readers, put it in an

Why not have the best of both worlds? If you really have something to say that's important, lengthy, and worthy of the reflection of your readers, put it in an "essays" section of your site where comments are disabled and link to it in a blog post in the "blog" section, where comments are enabled. People who are only interested in your thoughts will read the essay and then leave. People who want to participate in the discussion can go to the blog post and do so there. The "comments are noise" attitude presumes most comments have nothing valuable to add (which may be true to various degrees, depending on your readership). But this is a judgment coming from the author's perspective. The comments may be noise to him or her, but might be very valuable to other readers. Even if they seem to discuss tangential minutiae. I agree with Joel. Before blogs emerged, there were plenty of websites where people opined on various things without feedback from the readers. The expectation that most people have when they go to a blog is that there will be some level of interaction with the author and other readers.