Jay explores the rise and fall of blog comments, identifying a problem which deserves (and probably has) a special term (Jeremy’s law, perhaps):

…comments are great when the topic of blogs is more narrow, and the blogger is directly engaged. But in the context of broad and widely popular communities, they had the capability to fester.

It’s worth reading Jeremy’s thoughts on this subject, which are surprisingly ahead of their time — when I started blogging in 2008, I considered comments a straightforwardly good thing. And in fact they were for me, as I was part of a small group of web design bloggers who would comment on each others’ posts (on drawar.com, Inspiration Bit and Nils Geylen’s site, among others), and on a relatively small network of other sites, such as iA (when it was still informationarchitects.jp) and Jon Tan(gerine).

I would add a further, technological reason for the demise of blog comments — at least among web and tech bloggers — and that’s the adoption of static site generators (SSGs) over “traditional” blogging software, such as WordPress and MovableType (strictly speaking a static site generator, but one with a full content management system — and comments).

I’ve written about why I ditched WordPress for Jekyll in 2013 and how the leading SSG hosting provider made a land grab for all our hosting needs. The JAMstack moves the effort of hosting comments from our do-it-all-for-us software to a server somewhere else that we’ll need to configure. This is difficult, flakey and even expensive work, which you’re not going to bother with if you’ve also bought the whole databases and scripting are bloat that just slow my website down schtick.

The JAMstack is not a tech that encourages community, and not just because it removes comments. Software like WordPress comes with a nice (ahem) visual editor that you can login to on any device with an internet connection, while Jekyll, Zola et al demand writers learn arcane sets of command line invocations. You can’t publish a post from anywhere; instead, you enter your commands into a PC with the SSG scripts installed on it, then send your site to a server.

Again, we see how tech encourages individualism, placing the onus on you to learn skills to perform the most basic function of publishing a static HTML page, while encouraging a business of the self approach to publishing (or deploying) — designing needlessly for performance, accessing APIs, writing “microservices”, using CDNs etc. etc.

Still, if we are witnessing the return of more traditional tech that does things like comments for its users, then this could mean the return of comments on blogs. If we’ve also learned that big isn’t best, and resist the return of superstar bloggers, perhaps safer, manageable communities are possible here on our websites in the comments sections.