What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.
That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned.
In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam. But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a conundrum...
If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).
That was nearly 7 months ago I guess? Looking in Webmaster search console it says I had 15.5k clicks and 237k impressions last 28 days (compared to 17k/297k 7 months ago), so maybe there are less visitors now. Not sure.
I might turn the analytics back on at some point to find out!
Most successful blogs and news sites I've seen tend to have multiple ways for their audience to contact them. Usually comments for posts plus accounts on various major social media sites and some sort of chat feature (for gaming sites nowadays it's often Discord, though it could be a forum, or Slack or IRC).
Of course, you then have to strike a balance between getting setup on every platform under the sun (and spreading yourself too thin) or putting all your eggs in basket (and depending too heavily on traffic from a single source or platform). But yeah, there are usually multiple ways for people to contact successful blog authors.