The purpose of writing on blogs, community sites like Comment is free, and much of social media is to start or further a conversation – not to share a few writerly pearls of wisdom. The great majority of writers on this site (and the New Statesman, for that matter) are paid. It’s a job. Too much of the conversation about comment threads is about how writers – people paid to serve an audience – feel.

— from an excellent defence by James Ball of the role of comments on websites.