Over the weekend, this post on Paul Graham's blog got a lot of attention. The title was "How to Disagree," and it focused on the different types of negative, or disagreeing, blog comments. As Matthew Greensmith of Geek News Central called it, it was "a true geek masterpiece." Paul listed all the different types of disagreements (as related to blog comments) on a hierarchical scale from DH0 (name-calling) to DH6 (refuting the central point). And while the varying levels of disagreement detailed in the post were right on target, the question that came to mind is "what about agreement?" Why is it that positive reactions to blog posts are so much harder to come by? And how can bloggers get more of them?
In Paul's post, he notes that "Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications."
It's true. When you're agreeing with an author of a blog post, it just seems kind of silly to take the time to write out a comment that simply states: "I agree." So instead, the agreement or the liking of the post stays off-record. This means that even on a more universally well thought of post, the comments will often be the domain of the discordant few. This doesn't give a fair representation of the thoughts and reactions of the readers and, therefore, doesn't provide any true insight into the way the issue is perceived. It could be that 90% of the readers think the author is correct in their opinion, but only the 10% who feel differently have made their voices heard.
Additionally, as those of you who are also bloggers know, it can be disheartening for authors to read through blog comments to only find comments consisting of "well, actually...," "this is old news," and the equivalent of "that's so lame!" filling up the commentary section. Perhaps the post was lame, but then again, it could be that those who enjoyed it haven't taken time to respond.
Commentary and opinions don't have to be pigeon-holed as being in agreement or disagreement, though. Yes, some opinions could be in favor of or against the post, but others could be undecided, confused, or neutral. Unfortunately, it seems that readers with those sorts opinions just move on, not bothering to post anything anywhere until they happen across a blog that sufficiently riles them up over an issue.
Maybe it's just human nature to only be inspired to opine when you're vehemently against something.
So for generating positive reactions, a service like FriendFeed (sorry in advance to those of you who are sick of the hype) fills a void. In FriendFeed, a simple click allows you to "like" a blog post. You don't have to comment. You aren't whisked away off-site like you are when clicking a Digg button. It's just one click in your stream of content. You see a smiley face. The blog author sees a smiley face. It's nice.
In fact, in this respect, FriendFeed is the new Digg. Yes, I said it.
Whereas at one time, digging a post meant "this is interesting, I enjoyed it," these days, digging is a serious business. Writing for Digg, the logistics of getting to the front page, befriending the elite diggers, the potential for buries...it has all made Digg an interesting and important ecosystem to generate traffic and interest for a web site, but soon, it will no longer the best way to see the true popularity of post. Instead, highly dugg stories are more like a combination of various forces, metrics, timing, and luck.
Instead, it's the smiley faces of FriendFeed that will be the metric of the future for judging popularity of a blog post. Especially since the FriendFeed API has introduced a way for a Wordpress/FriendFeed plugin to exist. All we need now is a universal plugin that's tweaked so as to let you "like" the post on FriendFeed while still on the blog's web site itself. Then we'll really be in business.
Example of the FriendFeed plugin in action
For what it's worth, the plugin also addresses earlier concerns that the conversation has left the blogosphere. And with blog commenting system, Disqus, being able to integrate back into FriendFeed, it all comes full circle. But that's another post.
While FriendFeed makes it easy for people to mark their enjoyment of a blog post, having people comment on the blog with something useful, constructive, or positive is far more difficult.
Referring back the Geek News post, the author writes, "There are loosely 3 groups in increasing order of prevalence: those that want to add something to the conversation (constructors), those that have a strong contrary opinion (objectors) and those that just want attention (detractors)."
It's easy to get detractors. Just throw up an inflammatory post, make some wild claim, or post something that's knowingly inaccurate. Comments ensue.
Objectors aren't so bad, either. They sit on the other side of the fence and offer a differing viewpoint. Sometimes, an objector can also be a constructor and add to the post. I think of this example, where our "Comment of the Day" winner, Jerome, was so convinced about Google Docs' brilliance that he took the time to give numerous examples of what the service can do, which led to a discovery of a feature that many of us were unaware of: GoogleLookUp. So objectors can definitely add to the blog.
Other times, the objectors fall somewhere else on the "Paul Graham Scale of Disagreement," desperate to share their opinion, but going about it in a less convincing way (see DH3 and below). While sometimes the name-calling (DH0) can be humorous (yes, I'm guilty of have voted up the occasional hilarious Digg comment), more often than not it's a detractor to the conversation.
So how can you entice the elusive constructor to add their thoughts to a blog post? To get this sort of blog commenter, you have to first attract a quality readership to your site. This is more difficult. Articles have to well-researched, well-written, intelligent, and insightful. For a blog to provide regular posts of high quality is difficult, but it can be done. And once you have quality readers - those who thoughtfully read the article, think about what they want to say, and then compose their thoughts in a way that creates a valuable addition to the original post - you have a conversation of merit and something worth reading.
And shouldn't that be the true goal of blogging? Intelligent conversation? As a blogger, the focus should be on starting that conversation; for readers, it should be adding to it. Blogger and reader don't always have to agree with each other, but being able to at least constructively debate the issue brings something to the table that straightforward reporting does not.
In this age of information overload, constructive conversations will win out in the long run. You'll find the best conversations through your network of friends - shared in Google Reader, posted on FriendFeed, or maybe even the old-fashioned way (email!). As you narrow your focus to this unique and personal slice of the web, you'll remember why you love blog reading in the first place - not to get Google Reader to stop saying "1000+" - but to join a conversation, add value to a discussion, find like-minded people, debate an issue, learn something new, and maybe even better understand yourself and the world.
Comments
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I thought this was a very interesting post thanks for writing it!
; )
Seriously though, it is interesting to see more of this kind of connection going on. I like the potential of mixing it up with various APIs to provide the various features usually found within a single Social Networking site but available across a whole range of blogs / websites without being tied into any particular one.
Posted by: Rick Curran | April 1, 2008 6:43 AMI can see the logic in your argument but I think you've painted your strokes a bit too broadly with the implication that your premise fits all classes of blogs. Perhaps you mean only that narrow segment of professional, tech-related blogs? If so, I'd make that clear from the outset.
I can name one instance in which your argument, "...that positive reactions to blog posts are so much harder to come by," and that is in the arena of knit blogs. Whether they are of the knitting rock star variety (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka The Yarn Harlot) or your new blogger just getting off the ground, knitters take great care to be encouraging and positive in their comments. Some, like the aforementioned Yarn Harlot, get hundreds of comments per day with many people vying for the top spot. Granted most of her comments are of the adoration variety so I don't think they add to a conversation in any meaningful way.
I've also noticed that many of us garden variety knit bloggers use the number of comments and subscribers as a kind of popularity and quality of content barometer. This is the one part of your thesis which may hold true across the blogging spectrum. Hopefully, someone is listening, else why speak?
By the way, just in case you think, "Feh! Knit bloggers. Who cares?", then you'd better think again. We churn out authors and designers from our ranks. We generate sales and support growing, craft-based businesses on an international scale. We even have our own social network called Ravelry. At one year old and still in beta, over 100,000 people have joined its ranks.
Posted by: Karen B. | April 1, 2008 6:57 AMI'm tempted to say "what a load of crap!" just for the sake of irony, but I'll refrain :-)
I certainly agree that "the true goal of blogging" should be "intelligent conversation", but I'm quite cynical about whether this is possible, unless the postings are pre-screened (and even then it's problematic). It's just too easy for AnonymousGeek116 to have a hissyfit over some irrelevant point and the whole conversation gets sidetracked.
There's still some valuable content in many of the blog comments, so it's certainly worthwhile to scan them and tune out those that are not contributing to the conversation. This probably sounds like I'm vying for one of those "Comment of the Day" awards, but I do think that RWW has some of the most intelligent blog posts and comments on the 'net. (And I think those "Comment of the Day" awards are over with, yes?)
But IMHO, intelligent conversation is almost always face-to-face conversation. Too much meaning is conveyed through physical gestures and facial expressions, and all that is lost on the 'net.
Which raises the obvious question of why I'm bothering to comment. But like I said earlier, I like irony! :-)
Posted by: Marcello | April 1, 2008 6:57 AMHaving good content can only get you so far unless you also provide a good atmosphere to comment in. Just like you can't have a good debate in public if you have people constantly shouting, yelling or booing you, what good is it for people to take the time to provide constructive comments only to be drowned out by the noise of detractors?
People who take the time to compose a good response, whether they are agreeing or disagreeing, want to be heard. Detractors just interfere with this. Good content might get someone to comment once, but unless they think they've been heard, why would they comment a second time?
What keeps people coming back is active work by the moderator to reduce noise so that people get heard. That means deleting bad comments, even if that doesn't seem right to some people.
Posted by: Tom | April 1, 2008 7:08 AMI write a music blog for my audience research class. I'm new to blogging and I want them to be good! So any advice you guys could give me would be great.
Posted by: Marina | April 1, 2008 7:38 AMI've been coming to the conclusion that blog comments matter a lot less than before... evidence:
a) I see about a 50% success rate in commenting on weblogs... almost every other comment submitted never shows up in the thread, whether from bad spam prevention or because it cuts the blog-owner's storyline.
b) Lots of the cross-linking between blogs occurs having never been exposed to the comments... the RSS sociology is different than the HTML sociology, and particularly when the speed at which you crack a new headline atop an apparent scandal determines your AdSense revenue for the day, there are motives to getting the story wrong.
That whole "CS3 spies on you" story last Christmas is a good example. The original source post had a correction in comments within the first day, but that comment was never let out of moderation, leading other spiked-comment blogs to build their own headlines atop it:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/12/republishing_co.cfm
Blog comments aren't yet dead, but they're dying, at least among some of the louder-voiced weblogs.
jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell | April 1, 2008 9:04 AMCannot believe that a hacked together wordpress plug-in gets coverage on RRW - when fav.or.it just demonstrated a system for tracking comments across the *whole* blogosphere and it does not even get a mention.
To demonstrate - http://blog.fav.or.it/2008/03/31/giving-the-conversation-back-to-the-blog/
Don't get me wrong I love FF - but is never going to replace the commenting space with its stream - we work 'with' API's that already exist.
Posted by: Nick Halstead | April 1, 2008 9:15 AMTL;DR.
Posted by: Keith Shepard | April 1, 2008 9:18 AMIf you want to experience high profile blogs that have overwhelmingly good compliments, visit Problogger.
The compliments never cease to stop pouring in.
To a lesser degree, MattCutts and Creating Passionate Users
have/had mostly positive comments.
Surprising, some videos on YouTube dealing with Old beauty pageant seem to get dozens of Thank Yous and platitudes from those reflecting.
It appears that historic entertainment trivia brings emotional joy to those reflecting about the 'good old days'
Of course the most brutal sites are the Entertainment /Gossip blogs
Was quite surprised to see this video created a couple of days ago get RELATIVELY positive reactions from those same readers who are usually extremely vicious and cut throat
http://www.omnisio.com/beauty/miss-universe-winners-being-announced--crowned
Posted by: * Miss Universe | April 1, 2008 9:24 AMPerhaps, they are older????????!!!
This was one of the more insightful posts I've read in a while. I continue to find comments very useful however. They're almost like an accuracy validator. Once you read through them and slice out the junk you're left with some very helpful additions to the original post. Ideally the post's author would then post an "update" message to the post noting any corrections found in the comments.
I wonder how the spectrum would shift if instead of public comments you provided the reader a feedback/contact form.
Posted by: iamshimone | April 1, 2008 10:43 AMI agree.
Posted by: Jeremy Wright | April 1, 2008 12:39 PMBlog comments, FriendFeed likes, and Diggs are only part of the equation. Some people show their like for a blog post by linking to it and commenting on it on their own blog. Yes, it's conversation fragmentation, but you can't always assume that a comment on a blog post will appear at the blog post itself. People will comment in the place that is most convenient for them.
Posted by: Ontario Emperor | April 1, 2008 1:07 PMLike
Posted by: Aviv | April 1, 2008 1:16 PMI just have to point out that RWW certainly has some great commenters, based on the responses here.
@Karen B. Fascinating info on the knitting blogs. It's true that we something tend to think that this niche (tech blogs) is representative of the whole. Clearly, that's not the case. I'm curious now about the other niches and how they fare.
@Rick C. I love the idea of integrating social networking more into the blogs. And by more, I don't mean "share this"/"digg this" with blog content going out to other sites. I mean reversing it, and bringing social network content back into the blog. Yeah, like the FF plugin.
@Marcello Interesting points, but I think that blogging/commenting is a form of conversation. You may not have the ability to see facial expressions, etc., but it's still worthwhile discourse.
@jeremy @ontario LOL
Posted by: Sarah Perez"How can you entice the elusive constructor to add their thoughts to a blog post? To get this sort of blog commenter, you have to first attract a quality readership to your site. This is more difficult. Articles have to well-researched, well-written, intelligent, and insightful. "
The other way would be to challenge those "elusive constructors" to explore uncharted territory, because they'll probably like to help build something new. Asking interesting questions (and getting them noticed) might be all that it takes. Even admitting to total ignorance might not put someone like that off. Everyone was ignorant around his topic of expertise once in his life. I think showing a willingness to learn is the most important factor.
Later on your articles might get well-balanced, intelligent and insightful, and it would please the constructor. Why else would he comment on your blog?
Posted by: Meryn Stol | April 1, 2008 2:17 PMA conversation is not a one shot statement and response; it is interaction that extends across a sequence of statements and responses.
Look at the way this blog post about commenting and intelligent conversation is organized. You wrote the post. Fifteen [now 16] people responded. Each of the 16 responded to you without any reference to the others. And you responded to the comments once. It is hard to think of this as conversation.
First the organization of the commenting does not facilitate responding to earlier comments. You could say, as Meryn said, but then I would have to sort back through the 15 comments to find out who Meryn is and what he said.
Second, it is hard to imagine returning to look at later comments. I cannot easily skip the comments I have already read and read the new ones. So no one returns.
It would help create conversation among commentors if the RWW comments section was organized with reply and keeping track of what I have already read. There are many social networks that do just that. I assume that is not an impossible task notwithstanding I have not seen a comment section organized this way.
And since the commenting stopped at 2:17 this afternoon I assume that no one will read this comment, which is another reason for not writing it.
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Posted by: penis enlargement | April 2, 2008 10:46 PMHi, I found this a very insightful analysis of what is going on in the social media world. I totally agree that "intelligent conversations" are what draws people to read blogs/websites/newspaper articles. It is exactly the reason I have in subscribing to RWW articles.
With specific reference to social media, I feel that social media can do more to make it more of a "conversation". One way that this can be done is to allow all responses to comments on blogs to be tracked. This is similar to Bob Boynton's comment that "it is hard to imagine returning to look at later comments. I cannot easily skip the comments I have already read and read the new ones. So no one returns." One way to implement this would be a social media tool that records your comments and then keeps tracks of the comments that comes after yours. It can collate those responses in RSS form too.
Posted by: ElizabethK | April 3, 2008 11:06 PMGreat info, i appreciate your way of writing and knowledge sharing
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Posted by: penis enlargement medicine | April 7, 2008 10:09 AMI am glad to post my views and points in this blog, but I must say that webmaster of this blog has done a very great job to make his blog more informative and more discussable but unfortunately everything is same here that more than 80% in this and other blogs post their comments for making spam!!!, so i will really all this spam links to google band tool, because webmaster makes blogs for making discuss and for sloving each other problems. thanks
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Thanks for this post. Relating to this blog, I'm surprised you say people comment when they disagree with a post. I think readwriteweb shows their readers really think about what is posted, compliment the poster, elaborate on the post, correct it and, if needed, strongly disagree.
Posted by: Samuel | April 8, 2008 2:05 AMI'm also surprised that you didn't point to comment reading and tracking tools. For me not having these tools made it hard to keep track of my comments, go back and continue the conversation. Relating to Nick Halstead's and Bob Boynton's comments I find that tools like Cocomment still aren't known and used much. I am a Cocomment user and it made commenting and comment tracking much easier for me. I still have to try Favorit...
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Tag: detractor
;-)
Just to attract your attention on this new service http://www.commentag.com which aims at fostering constructive discussions back on the blog.
It's just launched in alpha for Wordpress but it is worth to give it a try.
Posted by: Xavier | April 11, 2008 12:09 AMEspecially as it doesn't mess up your database. So all your past/present/future comments are kept in your own DB.
golly - spam city up in here.
i'm curious why so many people comment when they do not have to sign-in, and then when you require sign-in to get better comments - everyone completely disappears.
i think that's weird.
on the 'without leaving the page' stuff - i wonder if we couldn't work out something on Digg that accomplished this.
For instance, with the increasing popularity of OpenID, couldn't we set up a simple PHP script proxy on the server hosting the blog, and when the user clicks the 'Digg' button, the digg request goes back to the originating server, which then shuffles it off to digg _with_ authentication information for that Digg user (is that possible?), waits for the response from Digg, then shuffles the ajax response back to the clicked 'Digg' button or widget or whatever - and that widget updates to the new value. Just a thought. Maybe bigger sites might want to do this heavier integration - because they can afford it? I don't know much about OpenID, but it seems like something like this might work.
Posted by: Peter | April 12, 2008 12:08 AMYou can please some of the people some of the time, but you just can't seem to please all of the people all of the time. Heck with them, I enjoyed it. http://fharefundsmadeeasy.com/
Posted by: Wisler M | April 12, 2008 2:27 PMWhoever controls the content is king. Do you control all your content, or does someone else?
Posted by: Hone Watsonyeah i agreee blog commenting is another step to socialize your sites or blog
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Posted by: web design wiltshire | April 17, 2008 3:07 PMIf you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
Posted by: John | April 18, 2008 7:49 AMIf you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
Posted by: John | April 19, 2008 7:48 AM
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