Originally Posted by Jdoughs

You add a description meta and you are limited to what you add to the meta tag (to many words/keywords and its spam), if you let google grab its own, its only limit is how many words are on the page and they don't penalize themselves for spam.

Lot's of unique text on unique pages? Do not use meta description tags. Let the engines pull their own.

Lot's of iffy content that may be hard for the spider to understand? Use Meta Description Tags to help them see exactly what it is.

On a text site that gets search clicks, removing the meta tags will bump up long tail search clicks dramatically.