Although I personally love comments, I have no problem if a website/business/blog doesn't want to include them. I'll simply talk about it via social media. If the post is interesting enough to comment on, then it's definitely interesting enough to share via social media as well.

Seth Godin has had comments disabled on his blog for years, and it hasn't decreased his blog's popularity at all. I remember him saying that the amount of time it would take for him to moderate comments would take away from actual productive work, like writing blog posts, which is the reason people are visiting his site to begin with.

I have a client who is a very popular blogger and gets hundreds of legitimate comments on each post. For every legit comment left, she probably gets 40 spam comments. It's gotten so bad that the site is now running Akismet, Cookies for Comments, Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, and Invisible Captcha. We also removed the option for commenters to include their URL, as so many would leave a worthless comment just to get a backlink (which to me is stupid considering they're "no-follow" anyway!). The amount of time that goes into comment moderation even with this configuration is enormous. I'm not sure what can be done about either the spam, or the time required for moderation.

On another note, I'm definitely going to be in the minority here, but I really think that the commenting functionality should not be included in WP core, but as a plugin that comes bundled with WordPress, similar to Hello Dolly or JetPack. I work with a lot of small (local) businesses, and most of them blog very infrequently, and when they do, they don't have time or desire to deal with moderating comments. If WordPress is used primarily as a CMS, which it is for most of my clients, and not as "just a blog", then it makes sense for this. I'd think the Jetpack commenting feature would be great for this, but as a standalone plugin, and not bundled with all the other stuff that Jetpack has.

Thoughts?