It occurs to me that LiveJournal users seem to get remarkably few comments from people who aren't registered LiveJournal users. In some cases, it's just not an option, as the only way for an unregistered reader to comment is to do so as "anonymous" and then just sign a name, and many journalers here don't allow anonymous commenting. However, many of us do—I do, and I have for some time. I seem to get anonymous comments at a rate of about one per year. There was that one guy who weighed in on a brouhaha that had started over at academics anon: a college instructor posted one of her students' papers in her journal so that her readers could make fun of it, and I got disgusted by the fact that several people were defending the instructor's "right" to make such a post. The anonymous guy tried to make a case for the notion that teachers could help prepare their students for the world of work by ridiculing them publicly. It was an absurd line of reasoning, but he did sign his name to his comments, so I knew who he was. I also got an anonymous comment a couple of months ago from someone who really was anonymous. And there was one post in which I encouraged a free-for-all, but that only half counts, because most of those comments were from people who have LJ accounts but felt like being saucy.

And that's about it, really. I can only think of a couple of people here who I've seen interact regularly with unregistered readers: marstokyo used to, but I believe those readers eventually got accounts here, and schpahky got comments from nickelchief before he started his own journal. There are a few others here and there, but that's about all I can come up with, and I know that a large number of us both allow anonymous commenting and have friends and family members who read what we write here.

I wonder what stops people? Readers are free to lurk, of course; people who object to having outside readers tend to make their journals friends-only (and if they don't, they should). But it seems like there's something about the LiveJournal set-up that specifically discourages commenting from non-users. Is it the fact that there's no place for them to put their name on the actual comment form, so if they want us to know who they are, they have to sign their comments? Does it seem like they're not supposed to comment? Or maybe it's that LiveJournal seems insular—perhaps cliquish—and they don't want to play croquet for fear that they'll end up underlining the word "eskimo" in someone's copy of Moby Dick. Don't they know we'd probably let them underline whatever they'd like in our copies of Moby Dick as long as they don't murder us first?

And by "they," I might very well mean "you." And if I do mean "you," and you want your own username here but don't want to fork over any cash to get one, let me know. I have about a zillion codes I can give out. A few dozen, anyway. And even if you don't think I mean you when I say "you," because you are a different "you" than the first "you," you can still ask me for a code. If you aren't mean or scary, I will give you one.