Confidential to Nick Denton
Gawker has disabled commenting until their new system is ready.
If Nick Denton is reading this, (which, duh, he is), might I be the millionth person to offer the following advice? Don't turn them back on. Ever. For any reason.
The case against comments is so well-covered I won't bother going over it again. The following quote from the above-linked article is telling, though.
We will not disclose the details of this algorithm. It is the public nature of starring, unstarring and banning that have made for so much unnecessary drama. The energy put into gaming the system is better spent elsewhere, in honing an intelligent or informative contribution. The most valuable contributors demand nothing more than this: civil company on the page, respect for their time and an intelligent audience. By those standards, judge us in turn.
How about this, though? Let people who want to comment use Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Tumblr. Or any of dozens of other sites.
On the Internet today, where anyone can share just about any story easily on the social network of his/her choice, why is it worth still trying to figure out comments? I'm hardly the first to note comments are a relic from a very different Internet.
So why spend time and money solving something that, once solved, still offers nearly no benefit?