City Lights is having problems with rogue comments again. I am both sympathetic and a tad snarky about the problem. Ed's troubles help assuage my envy when all he does is refer to one of my posts and gets three times as many comments as the actual post does. His troubles also make this piece this piece of virtual real estate feel a bit less lonesome.

From a broader perspective, comments appear to drag down a lot of blogs. Anonymous, unfiltered, uncensored: Comments sound like a great engine of the First Amendment. But they can become so overwhelming that some bloggers, like Instapundit, don't allow them at all, and others, like Roger L. Simon, have so many comments that only the most determined fans ever slog through them all. When readers have to be their own editors, all they can do is either ignore comments, suffer through them all, or sample a random few and hope to catch the wheat rather than the chaff.

There is something to be said for all those elitist, arrogant, mainstream editors pruning letters to the editors at newspapers. It sure saves me, as a reader, a lot of time wading through worthless crap. And people like Ed's nemesis Prof. Hibbs probably never show up on the letters page at all. Now that sounds like a better world.