Comment Threads as a Nutrient Rich Garden
Yesterday, I started to explore the concept of living in an age of excess value. I have spent today scratching out on paper my ideas that I have been thinking about the past few months as I have basically avoided digital interactions (the main exception has been on Facebook with close friends). When I look over my notes, I realized that there is such a variety of areas that I could tackle with this concept – both online and offline.
I thought I would start with something that most people reading this can relate to: comment threads.
Incidentally, as I was preparing to write this, Gwen Bell posted a great question on her blog: How nutrient rich are your comments?
Her focus is on your own comments that you leave on other places. Since the concept was fresh on my mind, I left a detailed response:
I’m starting to explore the concept of living a life with excess value, and living a life with excess non-valued items around them. People who like counting comments think of each comment as the same (i.e. they have 50 comments). When in fact those comments aren’t equal. Bloggers will discard the spam comments, but leave alone the comments that say “I enjoyed this post.” Those short one-liners add no value to the comment thread.
Comment threads should be treated like a garden. Bloggers are free to pick and choose which flowers and plants they want to keep – choose the same colour of comment, or a variety – while being free to pick the weeds that make the garden ugly.
This is unlikely to happen because bloggers rely on those comments to feed into their larger garden (their blog). Leaving a comment up, and responding to it, shows loyalty to that one reader and will have them keep returning. But it never helps that reader actually develop a more beautiful flower to leave in the garden.
When you ask, “How nutrient rich are your comments?” we should also be asking ourselves, “How nutrient rich are the comments on our blogs/Google+?” And how do we get people to take longer pauses and create more nutrient dense comments?
There are three things that annoy me the most when I read a blog post:
- Poorly constructed comments.
- Non-comments (i.e. “Great post!” “I completely agree.” “You’re an idiot for writing this.”)
- Lots of retweets and no comments.
On larger blogs (say TechCrunch) which are going to get a massive amount of comments, it is far more likelier that the comments left there are going to be rather poor and trollish. Curating them is next to impossible and would probably be a waste of their time since people go there for the blog content, not the comments.
With most blogs, however, the ability to curate the comment threads would be far more manageable. As I mentioned in my response, no one is going to do curation beyond “this is obviously spam.”
Whether we want to admit or not, responding to the non-comment comments and keeping them there for others to see, is making that reader feel welcomed at that blog and show them some loyalty in hopes they will return again later. Most authors will visit that commenter’s blog to leave a comment to further entice them to return to their site, and so on in a cyclical nature.
Take a pause and approach this problem as a non-blogger reader visiting the site for the first time.
When you scroll through the comment thread and every other comment is something that doesn’t add any value to either a comment thread or build upon the value of the original post, are you likely to leave a comment of your own? If you do, chances are your motivation to leave a comment of value will be greatly influenced by the quality of the comments left on the site. Why craft a 500 word response when everyone else is leaving short one-liners that will drown your comment out?
People are natural curators of their own works that get published. If you don’t like a draft, you keep working on it or delete it altogether. People are far more lenient with comment threads, and I think that needs to change.
It answers the original question that Jeff Sarris asked when he wondered what happened to social media interactions. A few days ago, Murray Lunn asked, “Anyone else a little bored with the whole blogging thing? I’m not saying it in terms of quitting but I mean it as in like “where do we go next?”"
Blogging feels stagnant because the comments are stagnant or worse dead.
It is the same problem with Twitter, Facebook, and eventually Google+. The good content/comments gets buried underneath the noise.
If a comment thread was curated properly to leave a variety of comments that strengthened the argument in the original post or started a valuable argument against it, or provided some alternative websites to visit, software to use, places to visit, it would help in a few ways.
First, the interactions between the readers and between the readers and author would increase in a positive direction. The debates would be civil, no trolling, and keep people coming back to check in on the responses to see how the argument has progressed. Ask yourself how many comment threads you subscribe to that you are generally interested in reading (and not threads that you feel obligated to respond to the comments because you’re the author of the post).
Second, it would help the creation of new content. The author would read the conversation threads, be compelled to explore the concept in a different direction or to do some research to strengthen their own argument.
The reader pushes the author to create good, and the author pushes the reader to think and create their own good.
Likewise, readers will take those topics to their own blogs and ideas will spread, not just linking back to one blog.
A good, recent example of this has been the whole Michael Arrington fiasco. It has developed some real interesting posts and comment threads with people writing about the topic from different perspectives (venture capitalists, journalists, tech journalists, prophesying the rise/fall of TechCrunch). The conversation has been happening on blogs, Google+, Twitter, video podcasts, and probably in other ways.
And what happens to those comments that get picked as weeds?
For me, when I leave a comment and it doesn’t get a response from the author or anyone, I try to change my style a bit and come up with something more valuable the next time I visit that site. I think the same effect would happen with the people who’s comments get deleted. At first, they will be angry about it being deleted. If they are mature enough they will treat it as motivation to create something better in the future.
Only by telling people that they are on the wrong track with their comments will they ever improve upon the comments they do leave. By taking non-action and praying that people will leave better comments, we will never receive good comments (or in my case any comments). The only way to develop a culture of good comments being left is to be proactive and help nurture our gardens to help them be nutrient rich.
The end goal being to create gardens that are self-sufficient so the author does not need to do any curation at all. The gardens grow and thrive all on their own.
By James McCullough
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Sep 15, 2011 @ 13:55:00
Wow. The re-design is just SICK. Hats off to you man! Tasteful and elegant. Even a little editorial Bill Simmons ‘Grantland.com’ vibe going on here. Love it.
Sep 17, 2011 @ 00:34:00
Well, it’s not like I did a lot of work on it. The previous design was okay, but I kept finding that the formatting and text-size was off. Drove me nuts. Found this theme, installed it, and just went with it. I’m liking the minimalist aspect of it. Haven’t decided if I want to play around with the style of it more or leave it as is.
Oct 13, 2011 @ 05:37:00
Hey James, Really loved the title of this post and the ensuing thought provoking concept of the comments thread nourishing itself and then ending up being more than the post itself.
I have to agree that at the height of my socialising as a blogger I would sometimes get comments threads that provided more value in the end than the post itself – but that was then lol….
I really like this bit:
Blogging feels stagnant because the comments are stagnant or worse dead.
I agree with this and I think it is also not helped by the whole ‘popular blogger’ syndromes – where you find many many people commenting on posts that really did not provide that much value in the first place, wasting time in a vein effort to ‘get noticed’ … or something…
Anyway – that’s my 2 cents – now I have to go help water and nourish someone elses comment thread
Oct 17, 2011 @ 13:24:00
In the past I’ve turned a couple of comments I made on sites into posts. They were that long. I used to spend 30-60 minutes doing just one comment. But then I added a lot more onto my plate and this forced me to use a timer and limit how long I spent on a site. I miss those days. I, like you, enjoy the nutrient comments.
A Milestone of Sorts and To Comment, or Not To Comment, @mattgemmell? - Four SidesFour Sides
Nov 30, 2011 @ 00:33:34
[...] how the problem with comments is that they aren’t curated enough (if at all – see Comment Threads as a Nutrient Rich Garden). What was interesting to me about this post was the ultimate decision to turn off comments, and [...]