3 responses so far ↓

• 1 sidereal // Jun 22, 2010 at 5:55 pm

  Oh sure. . throw your commenters under the proverbial bus. And the only means of response is commenting, thus voluntarily entering the class of people whose opinions can be discounted. Well played, sir.

• 2 Julian Sanchez // Jun 22, 2010 at 6:38 pm

  Well, you could tweet or start a blog or something. But of course, I overstate slightly—I obviously do pay some attention to comments. I just think it’s death for a writer to start thinking TOO much about what will please or displease the audience—doubly so if they’re confusing “the audience” with the very small proportion who comment.

• 3 sidereal // Jun 22, 2010 at 7:16 pm

  I know, I know. I’m just busting your chops. And who says I don’t have a blog?

  The point about distinguishing commenters from the general audience is well taken, and it’s a critical skill for the new information economy that many thin-skinned old school journalists and editors are hopelessly bad at.

  Interesting fact: I work on web properties for a “major media company” and we support our own comment system. We also recently added the latest generation of Facebook social widgets, including a comment widget and the like button. We have quite a few articles with 0-5 comments, which we took to assume little active user interest, and they turned out to get Facebook Likes in the hundreds and comments in the 10s. People are evidently more willing to enter a comment into a familiar Facebook interface than into heterogeneous sites, even though it provides substantially less anonymity.