Do comments make what you write about more relevant?
After our little experiment with being comment-less I started noticing something on blogs that I was browsing.
I took a trip to Whitespace and was searching around for some interesting topics to read about. However, the first thing that caught my eye was the amount of comments each of the posts had. I didn’t even look at the title of the post, but whether other people were interested in the topic, not if I personally was.
I think this is a major problem in blogging today. Many times posts about nothing get the most comments. Does this make a post more relevant than another? Far from it.
Take for example a post I wrote for my SOTW about Fall Out Boy from a couple months back. This particular post just seemed to catch fire with the TRL and MySpace crowd, even though this was not my intention. Sure, the comments were fun and they sparked some interesting arguments, but rapidly it became a forum for teenage girls to spout about how much they want to marry Patrick Stump.
Hey, that is all fine and good, but that didn’t make what I was rambling about Fall Out Boy more important than a post on iTunes Permissions. That post could actually help people who run into similar problems. However, if you took comments as a barometer of importance Fall Out Boy would win in a landslide with well over 100 comments.
This doesn’t mean that comments are necessarily the primary flaw in the system. However, even without thinking about it, people may rate the importance of posts based on the amount of comments alone.
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