After reading Tom Coates’ “In praise of short posts…”, I thought I’d post a little hypothesis inspired by observing people’s responses in the two months since I started this blog. The longer and more developed a post is, the less likely people are to comment on it. Some cases in point, all of which were long, and none of which garnered any response: “Contemplating Jazz”, “Moleskine Musings”, “Little Boxes”, my Hitchhiker’s review and probably my longest post, “Not Just a Design Concern”.
Of course, they might just have been boring.
8 comments
May 10th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
SquidDNA
You mentioned this to me offhandedly once and I didn’t get the opportunity to reply. I posit that the reason is people are intimidated by a lengthy (and especially a well-written) post. For fear they’ve missed the overarching point, they’re hesitant to respond to what they got out of it.
For instance, I might have responded to your moleskine post by offering that it sounded like they were indeed falsely appropriating great writers to advertise their notebooks. I might have further added that for the past year or so I’ve been using a notebook with a hard green cardboard cover that I picked up a salvage store for a dollar. Damn if it’s not durable. And yes, I can just fill it with crap if I like.
Placed alongside your epistle, it pales, you see.
May 10th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
ionfish
If that’s true, then it’s a bit of a worry for me; stifling discussion with a torrent of words was never what writing this blog was about. Yes, there are plenty of selfish motivations behind it, but I also hoped I might not only stimulate some ideas in others, but get them to respond, bat some thoughts back and forth, and so on.
Let me put it another way: I don’t see many of the posts I’ve written as finished pieces. They’re works in progress, milestones on a greater journey; writing them is like walking along a road, when you post something it just means you’ve reached the end of another day’s travelling. There are still many days of walking left, discussions to have, points to raise, but you have got somewhere.
It’s a bit late, and this is probably somewhat incoherent, but hopefully you got the gist of it. Small comments, like what kind of notebook you have, how you feel about it, what relationship it has to your writing, are interesting to me. This is meant to be a conversation, not a lecture.
May 10th, 2005 at 11:01 pm
SquidDNA
Oh, I understand your intent. I’m just describing the effect. I’ll make more of an effort to reply in the future.
Is there a setting to notify of responses, btw? With LJ I get emails when people reply, so it becomes more of a conversation. If I leave you a comment and you reply, I have no idea unless I come back to your site again.
May 10th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
bluevorlon
Well sometimes there is simply less to comment on a longer post, because you are more likely to covered most sides of a particular argument.
That said. I don’t respond to most of the long design posts because I don’t feel I have enough of a perspective to reply in a suitable fashion.
I guess, the more effort into the post, the more effort people see should be put into the reply in order to continue the level of the discourse.
Either that. Or you’re just boring.
May 11th, 2005 at 11:52 am
Assimilator
ion, the fact that there are few comments on your posts is directly related to the fact that most people don’t have very long attention spans. This does not mean that you or your posts are boring, rather it means that the only people who comment are those who actually take the time to fully read what you’ve written.
Also, the dearth of comments could just be because we’re lazy ;p.
May 11th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
ionfish
Squid: tick the “Subscribe to comments” box to be notified of responses. I set it so it was off by default (so as to reduce annoyingness), but perhaps I should change that. There are a few bits of tweaking I have to do once I get home tomorrow, so I’ll probably do it then.
May 11th, 2005 at 3:05 pm
SquidDNA
I don’t suppose wordpress would remember our default setting. That is, the last one we used.
May 11th, 2005 at 6:36 pm
ionfish
That would require CJ-like levels of coding trikkiness. I’ll mention it to him when I see him next.