Matt Gemmell has recently examined the issue of whether and how much on-site comments add to the value of articles in practice. In his article Comments Off, he ends up on the side of turning them off entirely, saying that authors now have other options for engagement with readers, such as responses on twitter or on blogs.

The main problem I see with this is that when the ensuing discussion is conducted via Twitter or scattered blog posts, it is not collected or collated anywhere. It’s interesting while it lasts; but a week later the discussion as a whole has effectively vanished and it is very hard to track down again, even assuming you are aware it existed. This is little better than having no engagement at all; it can never add lasting value to the original article, unless the author assumes the burden of collecting and curating every follow-up tweet and blog post and appending them to the original – which resembles comment moderation far too closely to offer any real advantage.

My own approach doesn’t avoid the problem of placing the burden of moderation on the site author, but it does offer a middle ground between the all-or-nothing paradigm that seems to prevail in these discussions. As long as expectations are properly conveyed to readers, you can have engagement that adds permanent value to your site. And part of setting those expectations may be that we stop calling it “the comment section”.