the explanation is banal. 10 hour days at my "day job" + i sleep 6 hours + and have a daughter. not much on the margin. i devote way more time to moderation of comments than a typical blogger as it is, so it shows when i cut back.
Fallout from Razib banning or driving away quality commenters has reached even here.
i don't see what that has to do with anything. LW people say stupid things all the time.
addendum: i don't have much experience on this forum, but i am friends with people associated with the berkeley/bay area LW group. as i said, LW people say stupid things all the time. but, LW people tend to not take it personally when you explain that they're being ignorant outside of domain, which is great. so my last comment wasn't really meant as negatively as it might have seemed. but the back & forth that i have/had with the LW set does not translate well onto my blog, where there is usually a domain-knowledge asymmetry (i'm pretty good at guessing the identity of commenters who know more than me, and usually excuse those from aggressive moderation, because i wouldn't know what to moderate).
There is a reason I usually state "the comments are well worth reading" when linking to your blog posts here. You are clearly doing something right, while there are of course false positives people can point to, the losses from those are far outweighed by the gains.
LW if anything is remarkably bad at this kind of gardening. We don't down vote well meaning but clueless commenter's enough and when we do one merely has to complain about being down voted to inch back into positive karma.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.