Diminishing returns as story comment volume grows
An My point is simply that a larger audience automatically leads to a conversation of lesser value, relative to the number of participants.
The post is pretty thoughtful and compelling and doesn’t come off like the typical screed against story comments. It makes a lot of sense, actually. Yeah, of course: The more comments, the more likely some of it is going to be garbage.
I suppose you can always make the case that story comments are entertaining, too. They’re not just designed to be informative.
The blogger numbers Haaretz.com, USA Today, the Daily Mail among the worst offenders.
Also thought the graph was interesting, suggesting the “economics of story comments.”
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Hey there Kurt.
So, this is assessing the value of comments in a single “pool” of commentary, right? Given that folks view five or so pages per visit, and maybe two of those are stories with comments, then a site visitor will see just a small subset of the total body of story comments across a news site. Sooooo, with 20-50 comments per story, well, it seems like a high-value element that does not get degraded by massive screeds. Just thinking that size matters (and agreeing that more is not always better).
Cheers!
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