Shane Life is a blog.

Your right to comment ends at my front door.

Derek Powazek talks about the entire web as a commenting system and his decision to turn comments off in his latest redesign as well as sites like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, which have not had comments on their site, well, ever since I’ve been reading them.

…I’ve seen incredible communities form in the confines of comment forms. I’ve seen funny, helpful, informative, intimate, amazing conversations. I’ve seen groups of people come together using the crudest of tools to form intense personal bonds. I’ve seen it literally change lives for the better.

Of course, I’ve also seen comments on YouTube.

I don’t think the problem is that people are stupid. I think that people, when given crappy tools, with almost no oversight, no incentive to behave, and no semblance of real identity, often behave stupidly.

The choice is not really to have comments on or off. The choice is: What is the level of community interaction you want to foster on your site? What’s the purpose of the site, and is community interaction part of that purpose? Too many people don’t think about these questions as deeply as John Gruber clearly has.

I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.

One of the things that I really like about Tumblr is that the functionality of using the entire web as commentary is kind of built in through the reblog functionality. I remember when I first started publishing a blog in Blogger and I remember what it felt like when I received my first comment. Those two things happened a LONG ways a part. I had written lots before I knew that anyone was reading. And that first comment affected the way that I wrote as did each subsequent comment.

I lost sight somewhat of creating things that I wanted to write and talking about stuff that interested me and became more concerned with “how do I entertain my readers?” That’s been an ongoing struggle for me.

If you’re going to write on the web, you should first care about the subject. Write about what you’re interested in. If you don’t, it likely won’t be very good and people won’t read it anyway. But if you do, it will likely be reflected in your passion for what you write about.