While most journalists hate comment sections with a passion, I loved mine. I saw it as a place for a form of what scientists call “peer review”. Scientists currently rely on a system of pre-publication peer review, a hellish system (in its current form) that routinely delays good scientific papers by years because there is practically zero incentive for scientists to review each other’s work as it is done anonymously for no reward, with the profits being taking by the owners of journals. I never had to submit my blog posts to peer reviewers but if I ever made the tiniest error you could bet your bottom dollar that within ten minutes flat I'd know about it in a comment that sure as hell would get upvoted to the top of the page, exactly where it belonged.

This is SO important. Since we are all humans, we're bound to make mistakes and our readers can hold us accountable for that or even provide additional information.

Although I understand the hatred for comments in a way as well - if you attract the "wrong" kind of people, who are starting to spread insults and conspiracy theories, this can be incredibly exhausting. A few years ago, I experienced this with another blog of mine which went viral for a short time.