Yeah, you can axe em. Should be fine.

tl;dr - while I understand if you want to remove them I would like you to keep them 🙂 , and maybe there is an alternative solution?

So, while I can’t imaging how much maintenance it is for your platform, I do like the idea of not having to sign up for another slack ( no offense, just kind of inundated by slack/discord/communication platforms 😅 )

I understand this crappy experience from my own situation recently had to deal with this at work, and we just ended up removing comments because we were getting over 50 spam comments a day. I don’t know why we all of a sudden got so many, because we just migrated the blog to being under our main .com tld instead of it’s own subdomain and we for some reason got hammered…

Personally I like being able to comment on things w/o another communication platform, because if ( and this isn’t necessarily directed to one of your podcast episodes mainly other podcast networks ) someone forgets to put a link in the shownotes. I can set a timestamp and link to it myself, which with the podcast player I have it also saves it in a location that I can easily access later ( almost like favorite’ing it, but it is just all your comment activity ). Unfortunately there are 3 issues with me using your commenting methods… 😓

1. I didn’t even know you comment system existed, sorry 😅 but I didn’t realize your “Discuss” button mean it would open up comment. Normally when I look at something the comments section it at the bottom, so I didn’t think for looking for a button which would take me to it.
2. you don’t see them at all…my comments that I have made get caught by my podcast player https://castbox.fm and all your other shows too ( i.e. gotime )
3. I don’t know if the same time-stamping would work if I was to use your comment system, and I would have to keep track of all the links as well ( compared to the ease of using my podcast player keeping track for me ).

On my personal blog I have comments enabled, but I have to approve each one of them ( through email ). I don’t know how extensible it is ( like how you said yours can email the guest speakers ), but the service I use is https://www.commento.io/. Maybe they will be willing to work with you and make it more robust? I don’t use disqus because I had heard about some sketchy things they were doing with monetization and tracking ( this was the only example I could dig up ). So, I went with the author’s suggestion of commento since they are supposed to be more privacy respecting.

Overall, since you said your issue is that it is “in your house”/“on your lawn” then maybe you could outsource the issue to a 3rd party like disqus/commento. Alternatively maybe you could do some type of integration with either a podcast player like castbox.fm, since they are taking your comments anyways, or like a specific twitter # like #GoTimexx i.e. #GoTime49 and that surfaces it to your website. Then it is in the same position of it’s on their platform, even though you are still surfacing it on your website.

While I know at the end of the day it is your platform, and you are going to do what you want. I would like to request to keep it please 🙂, or consider an alternative? Honestly even though I know about it now I can’t say I would use it more… Ideally since I know that it exists now if I want to make a comment I will try and use it more, but I can’t promise that 😅. If it was more directed question/comment before I just wouldn’t even comment on my podcast and keeping it to myself, but now that I know this exists I will try to use it more ( if it will still be around 😅 )

As one of the people who occasionally uses the comment feature of your site, my vote is to leave them. But if you gotta get rid of them no bigs!