The challenge of running a blog comments section.

Instapundit writes:

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD GETS RID OF COMMENTS ON HIS BLOG: “To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.”

I toy with the idea of opening comments now and then, but the above has always been my feeling, too.

Mead announces the end of comments effective immediately. No comments on the end of comments. I think he should have had one more comments thread on that post. The previous post, the last post with comments, is saying that the blog hit a new traffic record. That got 11 comments. 11 comments! Is it really that hard to "edit and curate"?

I like Instapundit as it is, without comments, mostly because it's all about sending people to other blogs, so all the other blogs stand in for comments. But if you're not a blog that's about linking to a lot of other people, it feels like there ought to be comments. Maybe it's just because that's what I'm used to.  I don't know. I love the comments section around here.