His post gets to the heart of why I’ve disabled comments on my personal weblogs for the last couple year. When we started up this blog, I decided to enable comments because we do enjoy talking with family, friends, and strangers. Additionally we are going to go to great lengths to set the tone in the comments section per post… every post is different in nature and sometimes whacky & randomness rules the day… other times a little storytelling is required.

… Back to Matt’s post, there were a number of great replies (because of the subject matter and also people know that Matt won’t tolerate nonsense on his personal site), the one from David Wertheimer is interesting because it talks about Matt’s project Metafilter:

Your problem is basic scalability. It’s the same thing that happened on Metafilter: when it had 3,000 users, it was divine; at a runaway 30,000 users, it got a bit maniacal. Your pragmatic solution (five bucks! barrier to entry!) was both profitable and had the added impact of preserving community and signal:noise, as a quick look at the free Yahoo Answers will attest.

Indeed. If sites like Y! Answers charged a $5 “activation fee” for each user account they probably weed out a lot of the noise. That runs counter to yesterday’s post from 37signals’ that “activation fees are obscene” because in the Metafilter case the fee is reasonable and the end result (better signal) was highly desirable to that community.