Why my old blog comments sucked

In the two and a half years during which I ran my public blog I did not receive -- I think this is fair to say -- one good comment. (There were various excellent comments on some of my posts, but they were all written by me under various guises). For a long time I attributed the lack of good comments on my blog to the scant regard it received from readers. Presumably they had better things to read, and, in particular, better blogs to comment on. Only with time did I realize that there were no other blogs with better comments: my commentators commented junk because junk is all they could produce. Quite literally, my commentators did not have anything to say.