On a New York Times blog, Stephen J. Dubner asks why people comment on blogs, although unfortunately, he didn’t provide any more insight over simply raising the questions.

It is a good topic, and I would love to know what causes people to leave a comment so I can facilitate more comments on my blog. I do know why I often don’t leave comments:

1. Login Required. I hate having to create an account and log in just so I can leave a three sentence comment. The effort is too great.
2. Nothing of value to add. While the post might have been great or insightful, I personally don’t have anything I could write that would add value to the topic, and I’m not going to spend time to sprawl garbage out on your post.
3. If I’m going to add discussion to your presented topic, I might as well write it on my own blog so I can maintain ownership of what I’ve written.

If you have any reasons why you do or don’t write comments, please feel free to leave a comment. No login required.

Additional thoughts added March 21: Apparently, users on ZDNet are discussing talkbacks, which is what they call comments over there. I’ve been reading more and more ZDNet posts because I’ve seen them come up in my Personalized News Google Desktop Gadget. Every once in a while I want to add a comment to either add value to the discussion or to challenge the writer. When I hit the register screen, I give up, mostly because it looks too big scary. More than once I’ve written a slightly longer comment not knowing that I needed to be registered until after I tried to submit it.

I don’t know that ZDNet should eliminate registration altogether or allow fully-anonymous comments, but I do think they should make it easier by:

1. Forcing authentication/registration before the comment form is shown
2. Simplifying their new user registration form
3. Allow alternate forms of authentication such as OpenID

I also have to admit to rarely reading other users’ comments. Although when I do make a comment somewhere, I like to read the replies to my comment.