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Threaded comments and other randomosity
Dec. 14th, 2011 12:25 pmIf I explode all over my keyboard sometime between now and the 17th of January, it's on account of the strain of not looking at White Collar spoiler pictures.
Just in case I vanish forever from the Internet, you'll know what killed me.
Actually, I'm leaving in a week for a Christmas vacation, so I really will vanish from the Internet. But only temporarily.
In the meantime, I keep having all these interesting things I want to talk about, and then ... not. For example, threaded vs. unthreaded comments! This is something I've been thinking about recently, since I've been reading John Scalzi's blog quite a bit lately, and a bit of G+/Facebook, and other non-LJ/DW blogs that don't have threaded comments (i.e. the comments are all in a big column, rather than being divided into sub-conversations - so you reply to the whole group rather than to a specific person; if you want to specifically address your comment to one person in the discussion, you have to say so, because there's nothing built-in to make it obvious).
When I first got on LJ, I thought threaded comments were awesome. They made it so much easier to keep a conversation straight, rather than constantly having to scroll up and down on message boards and other blogs to find out just what, exactly, "Jane @ comment #271" had said. And it felt a little more intimate, like you were having a discussion with just one person in the comment thread rather than the entire population of the message board.
But the longer I'm here, the more I'm starting to think threaded comments can become a bit stifling, especially in big conversations. For one thing, as the blog owner it makes me feel that I need to reply to every comment at my blog, and makes it a much bigger time-sink ... and therefore, makes me less likely to post new stuff, because I don't have time to create a whole new plethora of comments that I'll have to answer. Not that I mind getting comments - far from it! :D - but it takes time to answer them, even just to say "Thanks!" or "Yep!" (and I really do try to make my replies more substantial than that). Or you can pick and choose, but then it looks like you're just responding to your favorite people and ignoring everyone else. There are a lot of times when I want to say something, but don't really feel like taking the time to have a whole conversation about it, so I don't post.
If you don't have threaded comments, but just a tall stack of comments in no particular order, then you don't have to respond unless someone says something you really want to answer - which is less inviting from a social interaction/friendship/small-talk perspective, but a lot more appealing when you just want to toss out, say, a picture of your dog without having to respond directly to all the people who go "Cute dog!"
And when you jump into a new conversation - well, let's say that someone is having an interesting discussion, and you are reading the comments and see one that you really want to respond to. But it's a subthread, so you're not really comfortable responding to that subthread (and that individual person in the conversation) without also posting a separate comment addressing the blog owner's main post. I know that some LJ/DW bloggers can get bent out of shape if someone comes into their comments and only answers other people's comments, rather than also posting a top-level comment addressing the original post. (ETA: Or do they? See this comment thread. Is this actually a social norm, or just some of us assuming it's a social norm? I don't actually recall ever seeing anyone get yelled at for thread-jumping.) For the record, I don't actually care, myself ...
Just in case I vanish forever from the Internet, you'll know what killed me.
Actually, I'm leaving in a week for a Christmas vacation, so I really will vanish from the Internet. But only temporarily.
In the meantime, I keep having all these interesting things I want to talk about, and then ... not. For example, threaded vs. unthreaded comments! This is something I've been thinking about recently, since I've been reading John Scalzi's blog quite a bit lately, and a bit of G+/Facebook, and other non-LJ/DW blogs that don't have threaded comments (i.e. the comments are all in a big column, rather than being divided into sub-conversations - so you reply to the whole group rather than to a specific person; if you want to specifically address your comment to one person in the discussion, you have to say so, because there's nothing built-in to make it obvious).
When I first got on LJ, I thought threaded comments were awesome. They made it so much easier to keep a conversation straight, rather than constantly having to scroll up and down on message boards and other blogs to find out just what, exactly, "Jane @ comment #271" had said. And it felt a little more intimate, like you were having a discussion with just one person in the comment thread rather than the entire population of the message board.
But the longer I'm here, the more I'm starting to think threaded comments can become a bit stifling, especially in big conversations. For one thing, as the blog owner it makes me feel that I need to reply to every comment at my blog, and makes it a much bigger time-sink ... and therefore, makes me less likely to post new stuff, because I don't have time to create a whole new plethora of comments that I'll have to answer. Not that I mind getting comments - far from it! :D - but it takes time to answer them, even just to say "Thanks!" or "Yep!" (and I really do try to make my replies more substantial than that). Or you can pick and choose, but then it looks like you're just responding to your favorite people and ignoring everyone else. There are a lot of times when I want to say something, but don't really feel like taking the time to have a whole conversation about it, so I don't post.
If you don't have threaded comments, but just a tall stack of comments in no particular order, then you don't have to respond unless someone says something you really want to answer - which is less inviting from a social interaction/friendship/small-talk perspective, but a lot more appealing when you just want to toss out, say, a picture of your dog without having to respond directly to all the people who go "Cute dog!"
And when you jump into a new conversation - well, let's say that someone is having an interesting discussion, and you are reading the comments and see one that you really want to respond to. But it's a subthread, so you're not really comfortable responding to that subthread (and that individual person in the conversation) without also posting a separate comment addressing the blog owner's main post. I know that some LJ/DW bloggers can get bent out of shape if someone comes into their comments and only answers other people's comments, rather than also posting a top-level comment addressing the original post. (ETA: Or do they? See this comment thread. Is this actually a social norm, or just some of us assuming it's a social norm? I don't actually recall ever seeing anyone get yelled at for thread-jumping.) For the record, I don't actually care, myself ...