I removed comments from my blog for two reasons:

1. I went static, and didn't like third-party javascript solutions

2. People were using comments to contact me or ask questions that were better suited to email

Maybe those are bad reasons, but I've been happy to have one less communication channel.

Wanting attention for your submission is not always a bad thing. An enlightened individual seeks the feedback of people they believe will provide valuable insight. Although, even amongst these people, I wouldn't find it surprising to discover an undercurrent of expectation that their posting will result in a chorus of agreement.

For example, my blog doesn't have a community of people nearly as strong as Hacker News, so while pushing the discussion to HN is almost always a self-serving act, I don't believe it is always about ego. Often it's about learning.

It doesn't seems like a very good strategy, though. It seems ok to drive visits from the blog to Hacker News, but not really the other way around (which I guess is what people wanted)

But those people are then likely to vote up the post on HN (I vote up most posts I comment on, otherwise there's no point in commenting if the post might die). If you have even just 1000 loyal subscribers to your blog, you could perhaps get a handful of votes early on in your post's life which is enough to get it to front page within the first couple of hours.

Mmmm, good point, I didn't though on that. Anyway, if you have 1000 subscribers on your blog, it seems there's already an audience... For some "corporate announcement" it makes sense to have as much exposure as possible, but for a personal blog I'm still not sure is a good strategy...