I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
(Karl Kraus (28 April 1874 – 12 June 1936), Austrian journalist, satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet).
Epicurus was an intelligent man. He would have appreciated Herr Kraus’s clever aphorism, but would have protested that actually it is a waste of time trying to be provocative and to write what readers do not want to hear. Thus, the sign of a successful blog, for instance, is a high readership but a low rate of comment (pace the Epicurus blog). This is because those kind enough, say, to take the trouble to read something like this (thank you!) have better things to do with their lives than to seek out opinions and approaches to life with which they fundamentally disagree. We are tribal creatures. Look at the United States, where two huge groups of citizens, with two totally contradictory views on life, read and watch only the things that confirm their prejudices. There are few issues on which they agree. Each newspaper, magazine, TV station or blog attracts its own cultural adherents.
At one point, during the Iraq war, this blog attracted over one a million readers a year. This is because they agreed with its ferocious opposition to a war that was always bound to be a disaster. What the author did not know was just how big a disaster it would turn out to be.
Your observation is true in my experience also. With one exception, the best blogs draw the fewest comments. During the months leading up to the Iraq disaster and thoughout the war’s early years, the blogs that attracted comments also attracted such vile trolls that the host ceased comments altogether.