Metablog

It’s a bit of an unfortunate aspect of blog commenting that to really participate in a good discussion, a few conditions have to apply, and those can make it hard to participate as much as one might like and still lead a balanced life. For instance, most large blogs on my list have a ratio of good, substantial, thought-provoking comments to vapid, insipid, incomprehensible, flaming, or otherwise undesirable comments of around 1:3. That’s average. Less than about 1:8, I can’t really stand ever going through the comments. (In fact, those blogs tend to have main content that I don’t enjoy as much either, but whatever.) But the blogs with higher ratios also tend to be those with fewer readers, and discussion sort of just ekes along slowly there, since there’s not enough input to keep it going. There aren’t enough readers for there to be any dedicated readers.

And sometimes, even if the ratio is OK, the pace of discussion is just too fast. Commenters that have more time than you to dedicate to commenting come to dominate. This is a natural outcome of the dynamics of commenting. The more prolific commenters have a higher tolerance for long comments threads than the average commenter, so the more commenters you have, the higher percentage of your commenters will be the prolific, dedicated type.

So, if you want to participate at all, you have to both ignore all the comments you don’t really care about dealing with* and also take the time to read and sometimes respond to a sometimes large number of other comments. It’s quite a tiring prospect.

* And that takes as much effort as dealing with spam does, at least–except that blogs don’t have bayesian filters on their comments threads, unless you use an RSS reader with that feature and the blog you read supports comments.

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