Comments as an author are super helpful. It is one of the few ways to give feedback to a content creator.

Being able to give feedback to the author and have a dialog (sometimes) is also great as a reader.

Comments as a reader are hit or miss. Sometimes I read them but most of the time I don't. The reasons for this is probably more interesting.

1: the RSS reader I use and the feeds I subscribe to don't normally include the comments. And I don't want to leave my feed reader to look at comments.

2. If I am getting my content through Reddit, HN, or some other social place, the comments in those communities can normally be guessed based on where blog post was linked. The level of echo vs real discourse is low, at least for the places I get things to read from.

3. Slack is just a better place to have discourse. The trick is avoiding echo chambers. For the most part, in the slacks I frequent, differing opinions are accepted and embraced.

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So our brains as humans are wired to take shortcuts for us. These shortcuts, called cognitive biases, help our brains be more efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

These biases are one of the many reasons echo chambers/bubbles exists and also partly explain why getting feedback can be painful.

I have noticed that the more I learn about physiology, easier it is to interact with other humans. People are weird squishy beings but the more I can understand and predict behavior the better I can get communication.