I decided to try my luck and enabled comments for some articles on this website. Yesterday’s post is one of them. Another is the post on getting 802.1X authentication working on a WA-901ND router.

I’m happy with Disqus comments so far. But the software was not the reason I didn’t enable comments on this site in the first place.

The reason lied much deeper: I don’t think that I’m responsible to let other people participate in the conversation. There’s Twitter, there’s free blogging platforms all around. My Zettelkasten reminds me what Marco Arment and Shawn Blanc said about the topic:

• One-to-one-communication is done best via e-mail since letters to the author are of no immediate relevancy to other readers.
• One-to-many-communication is achieved when the readers themselves blog about what they read. Authors should include links to reactions on other blogs in their posts, though, to further the cause of creating discussion networks. They need to host the discussion by selectively link to other opinions, they needn’t host everyone’s opinion on their own page.

Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects sums up his answer to “Kill Blog Comments?” this way: you can’t both moderate and participate in a discussion, so you should remove comments. You need to put the discussion elsewhere.

I’m going to selectively enable comments on some posts despite these grave concerns because I want to get in touch with the casual readers, too, and hear what they’ve got on their minds. Writing the Zettelkasten book isn’t easy and I want to see how other people are doing their research and writing. I hope I can pick up more people when I make it easier for them to say something.

It’s an experiment. Thank you for participating.