Someone may enable trackbacks and disable comments - which is a good way to link into discussions people are having elsewhere without making your site look like a ghost town (empty comments = ghost town).
My article on SocPub this week was very popular, like 10,000 views in a week and 1,000 upvotes across Reddit and Hacker News - but for most of that not a single comment on SocPub. Nowadays people prefer to comment in their own private social spheres, or on community sites like Reddit. The web went under a tipping point some time back, without the network effect of people commenting on the main article site, effectively nobody chooses to.
My article on SocPub this week was very popular, like 10,000 views in a week and 1,000 upvotes across Reddit and Hacker News - but for most of that not a single comment on SocPub. Nowadays people prefer to comment in their own private social spheres, or on community sites like Reddit. The web went under a tipping point some time back, without the network effect of people commenting on the main article site, effectively nobody chooses to.