Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
The little difference
There has been quite a lot of complains about how the amount of comments on blogs has been reduced. That the amount of readers, according to the stats, has stayed as much or even grown, but the amount of comments has slowly or pretty fast been reduced. I had a blog sometime during the years 2003-2006. Well, I did have some sort of webjournalish thingies before that, but those were the years I actually had an active blog with commenting and all. That blog did receive a quite steady amount of comments. Not a lot, but some, here and there. The difference between that and Tomato Branch is clear.
I'm not just talking about this blog, which doesn't even have that many readers. I'm also talking about those who have been continuously blogging for years and have noticed this little difference. Now I do have a couple of theories about what's going on.
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Too much info
Since the time I was blogging in Finnish the amount of blogs has grown rapidly. There's more blogging services than back then and blogging has begun more and more what everyone does. Even your mom does it, does she? It's easier to create a blog (I actually built my blogging system with PHP and MySQL and it worked). Blogging is not anymore something only some geeks and desperate teens do. Organisations and journalists have blogs and some are even doing it for their living. Gasp.
Some of us even have several different blogs for several different needs. Besides this one I write a blog as my Second Life avatar and I have a rather inactive Tumblr blog (which doesn't have comments enabled).
This means there are more and more blogs to read and more and more blogs to comment. No one can or will read and comment them all. Single small blogs are drowning to the flood of information.
Since there's so many blogs and so many interesting posts to be read, sometimes it's easier to archive the posts to be read later. Services like Instapaper come handy in these cases. Unfortunately this may mean the some of the posts get archived and maybe never ever read. Or read sometime next year, as the pile of "to read" has finally been cleaned up.
What's up?
Facebook and Twitter, amongst other services alike have a crazy amount of users. Not just users, but also active users. This is a pretty new thing, cause just a couple of years ago Twitter for instance was a thing only social media "early adopters" did. So what does this have to do with blogs?
It's the 140 characters. Or so. These services have an ingenious idea for their users to update their "status", tell what's going on or what's interesting at the moment with very short messages. This means more info and more stuff to be followed and even commented. Of course these services can be used to promote the blog. However it's more convenient to comment the blog on Facebook or Twitter than to go to the blog and write the comment there.
Besides these status updates are turning some of us a teensy bit lazy. With all the information, tweets and blog posts pouring from everywhere there's no way to have time to read every single long rant. More than half of visitors on this site leave immediately, which won't give them any time to get much anything out of anything here. Congrats if you did read this far. Most likely you skimmed, but I'm not in a place to judge you about that. I do it too.
Spam, Spam, Bacon, Spam
The amount of comment spam is intolerable and it's just increasing. Because of it there must be spam filters at use. Which means the commenting may be made a bit difficult for everyone. Tomato Branch requires, besides the name and the message, also a valid email. This may not be something everyone likes to give (though I almost never even check the email, cause it's not something I can see easily).
It's also quite annoying to write a nice comment and see it being filtered as spam or being put into a queue to be approved and published. This blog does it, unfortunately (the spam filters haven't seen enough non-spam comments to know the difference). Other blogs do it also. Some blog owners are either too uninterested or just don't know how to check the spam queue and some comments never get published. That's something to make even the most active commenter to go away.
Feeling silly
One thing I fail with is being active and commenting other blogs. It's one way to get comments to your own blog too. Or not. Many of us bloggers are more interested in our own blogs or maybe the blogs of people we are close to.
Going out there commenting on some random posts by some random people can feel somewhat futile and silly. Why would this person be interested about my uninteresting comments? Do I have anything valuable to say about this subject? Will I seem stupid if I say what I think? Well, it's not always about the content of the comment. Of course it's nice to get another view to the subject or deep analysis of it, but even a "I liked reading this" works. Knowing that someone out there read it.
So... What?
Now you may be asking why the hell does one care if they get comments on their blog or not. The thing is the commenting is enabled for the comments. And many bloggers (not all) see the comments as a part of the post. One can write to herself without making it public like this. As I already wrote there, it's nice to know someone read the post and was somehow affected about it.
Obviously this is not a call to be offensive and attacking the bloggers just cause they've made it possible. Even if you disagree you can be constructive about it. Do you agree?
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