Over the past several days I have put three posts up on the front page.
The first, a critical takedown of a policy of sending misdemeanor convicts to church instead of jail. I thought this was a sexy issue, I offered a strong position, and included a bunch of direct application of Constitutional law. I got 4 comments.
The second, a gloss and meditation on another post on a different site about the law of war and the assassination of Anwar Al-Awalki. I thought my tone there was neutral as to the subject matter; if anything, I was shaded more in favor of the government than against it, as I found the underlying article persuasive. As of the time I write this post, that one got 53 comments.
The third was a sarcastically-titled analysis of a merchant offering a discount to people who quoted the Bible. Again, a reasonably sexy topic and one I put some legal analysis into, but not as deep as I had for the sentencing post. Again, I offered my own opinion on the issue rather than just neutrally reporting it, knowing that some would agree with me and some would disagree. But this post garnered roughly 150 comments (about a dozen of them my own) within 36 hours of being posted.
That leaves me with a challenge — determining what is it that made that last post catch fire, so I can do more of that.
determining what is it that made that last post catch fire,
Reminds me of this bit from Heinlein:
Brother Artemis, “God’s Angry Man,” faced the television pick-up. And if these things be not true,” he thundered, “then may the Lord strike me down dead!”
The coroner’s verdict of heart failure did not fully account for the charred
condition of his remains.
It’s unfortunately kind of simple and not necessarily conducive towards thoughtful discussion:
1. Religion
2. Abortion (kind of ties in with Religion)
3. Game of Thrones
These are the big 3.
Would the Seven have wanted Cersei to abort Jaime’s children?
I sometimes wonder at such things myself.
I pour a pint of blood into a post and get two comments. I say “Crap, it’s Wednesday night!” and throw something together in 8-and-a-half minutes and wake up the next morning to find a dozen and there are 20 by the end of the day.
Patrick, of course, can will a 50+ (if not a 100+) comment thread into existence. We should ask him…
I pour a pint of blood into a post and get two comments.
I find myself thinking “Surely this will get a conversation stated,” while hitting “publish” with glee, only to be confronted with the Internet version of crickets chirping.
> Patrick, of course, can will a 50+ (if not
> a 100+) comment thread into existence.
> We should ask him…
I can do this? Shit, did you just tell the centipede that you can’t imagine how he can keep all those legs straight?
When you figure it out, let me know.
I should add, the response I got to the first post — one about a nexus between religion and state action — was so poor that I figured my second one, the one that caught fire and continues to burn even now, would meet with a similar reception. So I was discouraged from posting it on the front page at all, figuring that people wanted to talk theory out on the front page rather than policy. A commenter here urged otherwise and that turned out to be a wise read.
Here’s my pattern on those three posts. Mebbe knowing how people think about ’em might put it in better light.
I think the main reason that first post only got four comments was that you pretty much boxed that sucker in and destroyed it.
I mean, not too many people are going to bother to comment with a, “Burt quite correctly took a fairly straightforward issue of Constitutional law, framed it properly, inserted this public policy report into that frame, and then burned that sucker straight into the fishing ground.”
There isn’t much of a place for disagreement on that first one, IMO.
The second post, I’m struggling with because I’m trying to figure out why my disagreement with practicalism is so strong on the Anwar Al-Awalki issue that it’s making me think about what I think about it, and until I can figure out why I’m so pissed about this particular formalism I’m not sure exactly what I have to contribute to the conversation, other than what other people are saying.
The last post touches nerves because there’s an obvious conflict between the First Amendment and the Civil Rights act of 1964 (and where you come down on that is largely a matter of how you think the second plus the 14th ought to work out in practice instead of principle). Plus, religion.
I think a small part of the difference between post 1 and 3 might have been that there had been a post about the Alabama hubbub a week prior. (Though yours was far better written and far more comprehensive; the first one which I penned was a quick 2 or 3 paragraph throw away post.)
But the big reason, I suspect, is that the Plano controversy exists in a more grey area than does the Alabama controversy. I think that those that can easily justify supporting the lube-job guy (and even feel righteous about it) start to feel a little less sure about the “Christians Walk, Muslims Do Time” policy. And if there’s anything the I note gets threads flowing, its the ability for both sides to feel righteous indignation toward the other. Lube guy was perfect setup for this.
> And if there’s anything the I note gets
> threads flowing, its the ability for both
> sides to feel righteous indignation
> toward the other.
I think this is part of it; but most of the more robust members of the commentariat are less motivated by “righteous indignation toward the other” than other places.
This does bring in the subcommittees, though. And it does bring in the driveby commenters.
What I notice, as well, is that there are particular members of the League who get less charitable readings than others (Jason is the poster child here, poor guy). This has a double effect: people start arguing about mis-attributed motives, and those people also can get aggrieved. I can think of a couple of dozen threads where Jason spent a substantial amount of back-and-forth in the commentary (there’s one on the front page now, coincidentally) explaining context.
An interesting metric (read: interesting enough that I’d like to know, not interesting enough that I’m willing to calculate) would be what posts generate certain kinds of comments. If Scott and Kimmi get into it on a post of mine, for example, or Jason and Bob, it can rack up a lot of comments – but I feel like they might have gotten into it regardless of the content or quality of what I had written.
Also, sometimes I feel most gratified when the conversation goes off in a really interesting and informed direction that I had not intended or foreseen. That’s pretty cool.
I talked to Maribou about this and her suggestion was “be wrong”.
No. Never.
…at least, not on purpose.
Dude, I manage to do that every single time without even trying.
I do this (I’m a terrible person):
“Hrm, Person Alice, fan of Framework A says Foo. Person Bob, fan of Framework B says Bar. But in situation DonkeyKong, Foo and Bar lead to interesting consequence that I think neither Alice nor Bob like. And they’ll both be trying to explain both how their framework doesn’t lead to the thing they don’t like, but they’ll be arguing with the other about how wrong they are.”
I’d throw that post out there just to see how and who gets my point, which is usually neither foo, nor bar, nor either framework. Usually, though, I’m doing that in the comments on somebody’s OP.
Posts like those usually generate a lot of noise, too.
Sweet! That’s exactly the angle of my next post!
A dearth of comments could mean lack of interest, or it could mean that the exploration of the topic was so thorough and/or on such a sophisticated level that there really wasn’t much to say in the confines of a comment box. For example, I enjoy reading Reihan Salam over at NRO, but the level of analysis (either his own or whatever he’s linking to) is usually such that a decent response would require a bunch of research and a separate blog post.
Also, number of comments seems like a poor gauge of quality anyway — if I haven’t been around for awhile and I see 150+ comments on a post, my first assumption is that some hot button has been pressed and 2/3 of the comments are just the typical ideological BS.
There is some truth to that last paragraph, but the thing that motivates so many of us to write in the first place is the knowledge that we have been read — and comments are about the only way available to provide that feedback.
Oh, and as I work my way through thousands of other blog posts in my reader queue left over from my vacation two weeks ago, I see that Tod Kelly also hit the Bay Minette church-for-jail issue and got 43 comments. (Egg on my face for posting in ignorance of that.) That seems about the right number to me, based on past experience — so now I’m wondering if the issue was he got there before I did.
Jason had already done the Alwalki thing. Got 300 comments.
If you want lotsa comments, make it a subject the politically correct can get a rush of self-righteousness on. Anything you can compare to the plight of the black man in America. ;-}
See my comment above about Bay Minette, but riffing on your first paragraph:
I agree with you that as a writer it kills you when you get no response to a post and elates you when the comment count starts piling up. I’m trying to figure out what that tells me, and how much I really want to listen.
A few weeks ago I did two posts about Lofgren’s defection from the GOP. The first I wrote late at night, bleary eyed with insomnia. When I read it the next morning I was embarrassed by what I had written; the snide tone and lack of clarity (both unintended) that radiated off the thing made me feel ill. Had this been my own personal blog I’d have deleted it, and had it disappear to the place in Writing Hell that my 7th grade poems about being misunderstood now live. Instead I rewrote what I wanted to say in a way that was clearer, more level headed and – most importantly – said what I had wanted to say the previous evening.
The thing is, the first post is the one that got all the hits, and was linked to other blog sites, and about which I *still* get emails – emails! -from non-Leaguers saying “You go, guy!” So what the hell am I supposed to do with that? I don’t WANT to be that guy that get lots of hits for being a bit of a d**k, but I do want to know that someone is listening and considering what I say, whether or not they agree.
I’ve been blogging now for about two full months, and I continue to be surprised by how much it surprises me, and by how much I am learning about myself.
> I’m trying to figure out what that tells me,
> and how much I really want to listen.
Pellet. Pellet. Pellet.
We are all people.
Maybe E.D. should look into some sort of feedback mechanism. I used to be active at a site where there were no official front-pagers but every member could have his/her own sub-blog or “diary”. Members could up-vote other posts, and past a certain threshold the posts would automatically be promoted to the front page. There were plenty of front-paged posts that had few or no comments, and plenty of firestorm posts with 300+ comments that remained in diary-land.
I’ve long thought something like this would be a good idea. Or even something informal, like a “nomination” button. So if an subblog author sees that a particular post is being received well, we can promote it (if he has the access to).
I suspect what you would get is a lot of Vote for Your Favorite Ideology clicking. So a really fabulous post by Burt on the dangers of mixing church and state might get voted way down the chain, while things extolling the virtue or libertarianism would clog the top.
I see that exact thing happening at Outside The Beltway a lot. That I often agree with what’s being up-voted is besides the point — a contrary opinion may well be incisive and worthy of consideration.
I don’t know that I’ve ever thought “this shouldn’t have been posted to the front page…”
Thinking about it now, if there were up-voting possible, I wonder if I would think that from time to time.
As it stands right now, the barrier to posting to the front page is the consideration of the author.
We’re all gentlemen, yes? Usually our own harshest critic. Things wind up on the front page either because we think it actually is really important, or someone else says, “Dude, this belongs on the front page!”
Put it to vote, and I imagine the practical difference would be that we’re changing it from “things don’t belong on the front page unless they really belong there” to “things belong on the front page unless we really don’t think it belongs there.”
True. If anything I find myself thinking “This should really *be* on the front page.” Especially those that aren’t political in nature, which I always enjoy seeing on the FP and which – to come full circle – lack the controversy to have the 200+ comment counts.
(Rufus’s comes to mind here. I rarely feel that I have anything meaningful to ‘contribute’ in the comment section after reading his Lit-based stuff, but they are still a favorite of mine from a reading point of view. I think having a mechanism that shifts to an all-politics/no-Rufus FP kills the spirit that makes this site great.)
Hmm… well, I was offering this particular setup just as an illustration of my thesis that the number of comments correlates poorly with the level of appreciation for a post. I don’t think this site needs it — a simple “Like” button would be good enough for giving y’all some feedback.
However, the members at that other site had a general sense of aiming for across-the-aisle discussions and also of front-paging only the higher-quality posts, so it wasn’t nearly as ideologically driven as you might expect. Every blog community will have its own culture.
FWIW, if we were to institute such a system here, I doubt that pro-libertarian posts would clog the top — at least based on the people who post and comment, this place tilts more liberal than libertarian overall.
Sex + teenagers seems to be working out well for me today.
I had to avoid that subject on Hit Coffee for the longest time due to an Argentinian commenter who was adamant that girls should be married off at 15 or so to men in their 20’s.
… that’s what, five years after sexual maturation down there?
stupid stupid mangos (seriously, something about the tropical fruit down there…)
Sex + teenagers seems to be working out well for me today.
Pay me $10,000 in small bills and I won’t quote you on that.
Hmmmm. I see your point.