[amitp]

I love having comments on my site/blog. I learn so much from some of them. For example, on my hexagon page, someone said there's a connection with "Eisenstein integers". I had never heard of them, and they were fun to learn about. Another example, I don't know "doubled coordinates" that well, so some sections of the page are incomplete. In the comments people have pointed to resources and code that fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Most recently, someone pointed out an inconsistency in something I wrote, and they were right — I have updated the page to resolve it. Before that, someone pointed to an emacs package that might make my life easier, and it looks like it will indeed partially solve the problem I had posted about.

I spend almost zero time moderating, because I've outsourced it to blogger/disqus. I'm not a big fan of disqus but the comments provide so much value to me, and disqus does the moderation so well, that I keep using it for now.

I think of it like giving a talk at a conference, and having questions afterwards. At some conferences, the questions are a waste of time. But at other conferences, the questions are quite valuable. I think comments don't work well on all sites. But they work well on mine.