Blog1 min read
On not having a comment section
What's gained, what's missed, why it's worth it.
No comments anywhere on the site. None on the playlists, none on the blog posts. There's an email link in the footer, which I read. That's the whole feedback surface.
What's gained is the most important thing about the site, which is that it has a single voice. Comments turn any quiet page into a chorus, and a curated thing has a hard time staying curated if anyone with five minutes can argue with it underneath. The point of a small site is to be one person's taste, accepted or rejected on its own terms.
What's missed is real. People send genuinely useful things — track recommendations, corrections, room-specific stories — and a comment section would surface those alongside the posts in a way that an email reply doesn't. The trade-off is real, but I think on the wrong side of it.
The email address gets enough traffic that I know the site has readers. The replies are slower than comments would be and more considered, which is the trade I made. A small site doesn't owe anyone a public commons. The internet has those.