Why I don't have comments on my blog

When I moved from Medium to my personal blog, I didn't just leave the platform with all of its built-in sharing opportunities behind. I also left the comments behind. This was done intentionally and I'm writing this to explain why I've left out a comment system. If you don't want to read all of this, I can totally understand! Let me summarize it for you:

1. Social media is no longer about sharing your life with others
2. I write for myself
3. There are better ways to interact with me
4. I like to own ALL content on my blog

For those of you who want to find out what I mean with these 4 points, keep on reading!

Social media is no longer about sharing your life with others

Social media has changed over the past few years. From sharing your own life and your interests with others to reaching the most people in the shortest possible time. I'm personally not a huge fan of reaching X amount of likes or receiving Y amount of comments. Receiving a single thoughtful comment means a lot more than receiving a thousand emoji comments. Reaching many people helps you to build a brand quite easily, but at the same time, it makes social media less social. It's being used for commercial purposes and is becoming less personal. To take back social media, and actually share part of myself, I've taken away the ability to quantify meaningful interactions and put the focus back on the content.

I write for myself

If the entire purpose of writing blog posts is to have others read it, you should take a step back. Especially when you're just starting out, no one will read your posts. So you shouldn't use views, likes, or comments as a quantifier of your writing skills. If you do, you'll get discouraged quickly, even though your content may be incredibly good. You should create content because the act of creating content is fun to you. The views, likes, and comments will follow if you're consistently posting great content.

This is exactly why I don't track views, likes, comments and other metrics. The only thing I track is which posts get the most attention. I track these posts because this means I have an opportunity to share my personal story about those specific topics more often. These views are never the holy grail though. I've written multiple posts about subjects that I know haven't really done well in the past, according to the metrics of the Medium platform. I wrote about a subject again, because it was fun to write about and I found the topic to be interesting.

When others read my posts, I'm loving it, but when they don't, I don't get discouraged. If I can read my own post later on and help myself solve some kind of problem, that's all I need. Ultimately, I'm writing for myself, be it for my own entertainment, to get better at writing, or to learn to help others. If I've been able to put my thoughts into coherent sentences that tell an interesting story, I'm satisfied.

There are better ways to interact with me

Imagine if I added a comment system to this post and someone asks me a question. That's pretty cool, right? Now imagine that I answer in a very thoughtful way to help this person and I spend time on my comment to make sure I get my point across. But this person won't be notified and will likely never check this post again. Well, now both sides have wasted their time. They've thought of questions to ask and I've answered in a thoughtful way, but it was all for nothing.

In other words: there are many other and better ways to interact with me that will most likely be much better suited for this purpose. My website contains my e-mail. If you have a question or remarks, send me an e-mail and you're guaranteed to receive an answer. In addition, you'll be notified when I've answered your message because the answer will be in your inbox. Every single post contains a link to my Twitter profile, where I can be reached most of the day. You can send me a tweet on there or a direct message and you'll be guaranteed to receive an answer.

In short, there are many other channels to reach me, so it's pointless for me to spend the time to add a comment system that won't be used to its full potential. There are already too many channels to keep track of. It's gotten to a point where I gave up on Facebook and Instagram because my time is saturated with other channels. This is one of the reasons those accounts aren't listed on my website.

I like to own ALL content on my blog

In my post "SEO and personal marketing for developers" I mentioned that I moved away from Medium because I wanted to own all of my own content. I moved everything to a platform that I owned and by doing so, present my posts in the exact way I wanted to.

Well, a comment is also content on a page, even if they're not written by me. I don't (really) control these comments and that just wouldn't sit right with me. I'm not a person for censoring comments that people would leave on my posts. This means people could leave whatever they wanted on the posts I've spent time on writing. I don't even want to think of the headaches this could cause in the long run. This is why I just opted to not have comments. This takes away the pain of "policing" the comment section. If you really want to send me a public message, send me a tweet. If you want to send me any private messages, there is twitter and e-mail.

You made it to the end of the post!

If you've gotten this far, hello, thank you for reading this post! I appreciate that you took the time to share these short few minutes with my content. This section may be a bit redundant, but if you have any questions or remarks, I'd like to direct you to my Twitter profile or to the homepage of my website, where you'll find my e-mail. If you are using comments on your own blog posts, why? If you don't, what are your reasons? I'd love to hear from you!

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