Slashdot, a user-generated news, analysis, peer question and professional insight community. Tech professionals moderate the site which averages more than 5,300 comments daily and 3.7 million unique visitors each month.
As I said before, we don't have a really good idea on the number of unique IPIDs visiting the site, but we do have solid numbers for our daily comment counts. Here's the graph as generated by slashcode for a biweekly period:
(due to a quirk in slashcode, the graphs don't update until 48 hours later; our comment count for 04/01 was 712 comments total).
Taking in account averages, we're roughly getting a little less than 10% of Slashdot's comment counts, with a considerably smaller user base. As I said, the OkCupid story made me take notice. Here's the comment counts at various scores between the two sites
| SoylentNews | Slashdot.org | --------------------------------------- Score -1 | 130 | 1017 | Score 0 | 130 | 1005 | Score 1 | 109 | 696 | Score 2 | 74 | 586 | Score 3 | 12 | 96 | Score 4 | 4 | 64 | Score 5 | 1 | 46 | ---------------------------------------Furthermore, I took a look at UIDs on the other site, the vast majority of comments came from 6/7 digit UID posters. Looking at CmdrTaco's Retirement Post as well as posts detailing the history of the other site most of the low UIDs are still around, and are simply in perma-lurk mode.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kebes on Wednesday April 02 2014, @09:23AM
- As there are more users and more comments, the opportunity to say something new/different decreases. So a given user is less likely to post.
- As there are more users and commenters, the pace of commenting rapidly increases. Thus, to get in a comment (and have a chance of it being seen/moderated/appreciated) is more and more difficult (you have to jump on the story as soon as it is posted). If you don't get in 'early', your chances are low. This decreases the likelihood of commenting, because the user feels like it is pointless.
- As the community grows in size, hostility tends to increase. This is both because for a given percentage of trolls, a bigger community will of course have a large absolute number of trolls. But it's even worse, because in a big community, people feel more anonymous and tend to be less polite. Worse still, trolls tend to gravitate towards large communities so that they can get more attention. The end result is that it decreases one's desire to comment. Even if troll comments are always knocked-down to -1, the community-at-large likely won't read them, but the commenter likely will read them. Even though we all know trolls are idiots, dealing with a bunch of hostile comments (or comments that totally miss the point you were trying to make) gets tiring and causes people to lose interest in commenting.
It's also worth noting that SN, by the nature of its inception, has created a selection effect: the most motivated people, those most 'passionate' about commenting, were the first to jump over here. As time goes on the demographic will likely shift towards having more lurkers.
I'm not sure that a decreasing percentage of commenters is in itself a bad thing. It seems somewhat natural. In fact, I think it's necessary to have some subset of people who are lurkers. There's nothing wrong with it (e.g. you may be a lurker on one site but active on another). In open-source software, some users may never contribute code or even bugfixes. But they still play a role (evangelizing, giving the contributors a sense of purpose,
On the other hand, I get the argument that we want the community strongly engaged, and commenting is one obvious measure of engagement (it takes much more effort to post than to just skip). So, I'm all for strategies that make commenting easier and more fun. But I would just caution against trying to maximize a particular metric (like "% commenting"): at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that we're all enjoying the site.
(Score: 1) by CoolHand on Wednesday April 02 2014, @10:50AM
hmmmm...
I wonder if some sort of "blind commenting" system could be implemented where for the first x amount of time comments aren't displayed -- no one can see them besides moderators. That would give everyone time to put out initial comments without being intimidated by the number of other posts that may cover the same ground.. Moderators could make sure the best well thought out comments covering the same subject matter rise to the top...
I dunno... just brainstorming
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(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday April 02 2014, @02:51PM
Interesting. I don't think I agree with trying this, but since we're brainstorming, I have another crazy idea. Don't show the name of the commenter for a fixed amount of time, but allow moderation and replies. Perhaps make an exception for friends or enemies.
I don't know if I like my own suggestion, but as you said, just brainstorming.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Wednesday April 02 2014, @01:57PM
I agree with pretty much all of this. I was a long-time lurker on the other site until I finally made an account, and over the course of maybe a year managed to get a few +2's and +3's and a SINGLE +5. Many times I would continue to lurk because someone had made a comment pretty much exactly making the point I would have, in which case it came down to whether I had mod points to give them or not.
I would add that there's a large convenience factor involved. The other site has inline expansion of comments, which when I am modding and looking for interesting comments to mod up, is a very good thing. Here, I think we see only the more determined commenters sticking out the rougher experience, as well as already having more of the "frontier" personalities as parent post mentions, due to age and circumstances of this site's genesis.
Right now there aren't so many comments that I feel the need to trim them down with a visibility threshold, but if we get inline expansion and the site userbase goes up, this will probably change. It will probably help encourage discussion when it's easier to keep track of the threads also, so that the same subtopic doesn't spring up in different places and fracture the discussion.