Blogging has been around a long time and believe it or not, a lot of blogs are still around. They may be in the guise of articles or editorials, but it’s essentially all blog posts. You know what has disappeared from blogs? Comments. Every blog I go to either has something where you need to sign in or just no comments at all. I miss the days where you could leave a comment without the need to sign in or create an account anywhere.
Yes, it can be riddled with toxicity, but it also transforms content from being static, into a dynamic conversation. It let’s the writer know what resonated with the reader, what confused them, etc. Not only can it connect the writer and the commenter, but between it can connect commenters as well. Of course it can also have another benefit as well.
An active comment section can boost SEO, keep readers on the page longer, and signal search engines to mark the content as relevant. You just need to be prepared to moderate, in case the aforementioned toxicity starts to break out. No one wants to read 400 spam comments or people throwing slurs at each other.
Even though I am pulling for comments to come back in 2025, when I started blogging on Lep’s Lair, I used a closed system. I had it setup where every blog post was a forum post and the comments were just forum replies. I know a few websites did it that way back then, but it wasn’t something that ever caught on. Looking back now, it was probably one of the worst way to do blog posts.
