Scrawled in Wax

As many before me have said, comments are among the most interesting, infuriating and compelling aspects of blogs. As Scrawled in Wax has been showing some (very timid) signs of growth recently, I’ve enjoyed receiving little nuggets of feedback – it’s both reassuring and edifying. I also frequently comment on my favourite sites, sometimes to argue with the writer, sometimes to point out a different perspective and sometimes just to shoot my big mouth off.

But something I’ve noticed recently is what I’m going to call the ‘comment wall’. What’s that, you ask? Well, let’s say a controversial story gets posted early in the day – on a tech site, something about Microsoft versus Apple, or a story about global warming on a news site – and you check the site in the evening. By that point there are already three- or four-hundred comments, running the gamut from inane to insightful. At times like these, my only thought is: what’s the point? Not only is the comment section no longer a conversation – ostensibly the purpose of having comments – one is left totally unmotivated to contribute. Hence ‘the comment wall’: there is a point past which the number of comments on a blog becomes a deterrent to interaction. I’m sure someone could even derive a mathematical formula for it.

I myself have had this feeling numerous times, for some reason most often on Kotaku and the Globe and Mail. An interesting story is posted, an overwhelming mass of disjointed, unconnected comments are made, and I click over to something else. Of course, the inverse problem exists also: that a complete dearth of comments discourages you from taking a site seriously. But it seems the former problem is the more serious one.

Comment moderation seems to be the best way to avoid the comment wall – folks like Mathew Ingram seem to use moderation to effectively have a conversational space that doesn’t become overloaded – but it’s an impractical solution for sites that get a million visits a day. Limits on the number of comments, however, would also be ineffective – what if your cap is met before anyone has said anything of substance? The answer won’t be simple.

For the time being, I’m just rambling about a phenomenon I’ve noticed without any concrete solutions. Still: it seems that as we all stumble through this new phase of writer-audience interactivity, we’re going to need to figure out how to not turn our blogs into the equivalent of a stock-market floor: tonnes of people yelling, but no-one actually speaking to one another.