A month of comments

by Eva Amsen

I did it! I left blog comments all throughout July, and got a few people to join me. You can see the full list of posts and videos that I commented on in this post. My favourite thing that I commented on was this post about things that change forever when you move away from your home country. It’s spot on, and many of the commenters were other expats chiming in.

What did I learn from this little commenting exercise?

  • I don’t read blogs the same way I used to. I used to have regular blogs I visited every day, and I would quickly see when someone replied to one of my comments. Now I read whatever someone links to on Twitter or Facebook. Several times it took me days to go back to that post and see a response. And I only went back because I was keeping track this month. Normally I would never look at a post more than once, but I know I used to, especially if there was an active comments section.
  • Commenting culture has changed. I knew this, and it was why I set out to do this, but it became even more obvious in the process that commenting on blog posts is not as much a natural thing as it used to be for me. Very often I had to push myself to leave a comment somewhere just to reach my quota. Some exceptions were YouTube videos, and existing discussions, both addressed below.
  • Some systems and blogs discourage comments and discussions. PopSci doesn’t have a comments section. BoingBoing has a separate forum to handle discussion, and it was tedious to sign up. Medium allows people to easily leave comments per paragraph, but you can only see comments when you mouse over the corresponding number, and when the author has made your comment public. One Wordpress blog has had my comment in moderation ever since I left it two weeks ago. I haven’t even bothered with Tumblr, because you need to reblog to comment.
  • Disqus and YouTube are most inviting to commenters. Of all the systems I used to comment this month, YouTube was by far the most convenient and the most inviting. I’ve always had a YouTube account, but now everyone with a Google account can also comment on YouTube, so the registration bar is low. (Make sure to untick that “share on Google+” box, so your G+ contacts don’t have to look at your out of context comments in their feed. ) The videos I commented on were mostly ones with very engaging comments sections, and the commenting culture is alive and well there. For blogs, the Disqus system works really well, and allows you to sign in via social media. It also works across blogs: I saw a notification that I had received a reply to a comment while I was looking at another comment section. Now that blog networks (in science blogging, anyway) are less popular, Disqus is a way to keep track of some of the discussions (hey!) you’ve been having across the dispersed blogosphere.
  • I’m more likely to leave a comment when I can answer a question or join an existing discussion. Of all the comments I left this month, most were admittedly forced. I wanted to do this, I wanted to leave one comment per day, but I didn’t always have something to say. A few times I started replying on social media, only to realise I could leave my comment on the blog itself. The exceptions were YouTube videos that already had a lot of comments or that asked questions, the post about being an expat (with lots of comments already there) and one of Fiona’s posts where I was reminded of something cool that was relevant to the post and any other readers of that post. I can see the same on my own blog: my most commented-on post in the past few years is the one about a company that prints your (already OA) thesis, on which people share their own experiences with the emails they received.

Overall, I think the tendency to only comment in active discussions was always there, and that the other factors that make commenting harder (dispersal, technical barriers, social media) have discouraged the remaining few people who would otherwise happily comment.

Brightening up someone’s day with a blog comment turned out to be quite a hassle, and I probably will go back to my regular irregular schedule, but it was an interesting experiment!

 

 

 

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6 comments

TBIT July 31, 2014 - 2:15 PM

Can I chuckle that the first comment to your post about comments in the current age, is a spam comment? 🙂

Eva July 31, 2014 - 5:07 PM

Haha! Yes! And the first comment on my post announcing the project the first time was ALSO a spam comment! I’ll leave this one just for context 🙂

Fiona August 7, 2014 - 8:43 AM

LOLz :p

Mademoiselle Scientist July 31, 2014 - 8:24 PM

Thanks for sharing. This is an interesting exercise to try.

Alyssa August 1, 2014 - 2:13 AM

“I’m more likely to leave a comment when I can answer a question or join an existing discussion.”

I’m a bit opposite on the latter! If a post has a lot of comments already, I’ll feel like I either missed out on the conversation, or my thoughts will have already been said, so I just skip it.

I need to branch out and try to comment on blogs other than that ones I’m a regular on!

Fiona August 7, 2014 - 8:43 AM

Thanks for kicking this off!

It’s got me commenting again, and remembering that people usually come and visit if you say you’ve visited them!!

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