Yesterday was a fertile day for comments on comments: John Gruber, Bijan Sabet and then Marco Arment all provided interesting food for thought. For starters, I firmly believe that what someone chooses to do on their own blog is and should always be entirely their own decision. It is their property after all and nobody is forced to go there or interact with it. That includes the choices to have no comments at all, to have moderated comments, to allow comments *and* delete them after the fact (after all, I would paint over a defacing of my house) or to simply let anything stand.
Personally, I enjoy receiving comments and interacting with them. Of course this is much easier given my small readership that leaves thoughtful comments than with a huge and diverse audience. Still, it would seem that we can do better than today using technology. In particular, it should be easy to choose whether or not to allow anonymous comments. As the audience grows, I would imagine letting only readers leave comments who are sharing their identity. I believe that would go a long way towards civility and quality in the comments all by itself. On top of that it would make it easy for someone like our portfolio company disqus to provide a reputation and scoring system that helps to show higher quality comments first.
