Here’s a nice roundup of commenter communities by New York’s Doree Shafrir (who along with Sam Anderson keeps writing these great Fast Company meets New Yorker style articles for the magazine.) I don’t often read comments, except on funny sites like Wonkette, where they seem to keep a joke alive. As I’ve written before, commenting seems driven by the same “annotation impulse” as bathroom wall graffiti. Every once in a while you’ll find something poignant, funny, brilliant, clever, but it’s also a place (and largely) for unpleasantries. Anonymous free speech is one of the most powerful things the internet provides us, that doesn’t mean it can’t be used for dumb or hateful things. Eventually I plan to disable comments since I don’t have sufficient time to monitor them. I’d much rather people responded to my posts on their own blogs or over email. This is true for most single-author sites. It’s easier to keep up a lively discussion with multi-author sites because already the other bloggers are there to chime in (or rush to your defense.) Doree also points out that “Gawker introduced comments in 2005 by sending out invitations to a select group of readers, making access seem (relatively) prestigious.” Gawker comments were hilarious then. I’m not sure that this kind of roll out of a self-selecting community could sustain today as 2005 was before Twitter and Tumblr. Also, I’d really love to see a Venn Diagram of former Gawker commenters and the first thousand Tumblrs, as there seems to be a large intersection.