Too Many Comments

Ever read a blog post that has too many comments?

As readers of this blog know, that is not our problem here.

But when I do come upon a blog post with scads of comments, I find it disconcerting. No matter what any single commenter has said, that bit of contribution is likely to be lost in sheer volume and clutter.

I do not, however, find this to be true with comments on YouTube videos. When I thought about why I feel this way it occurred to me that most blog comment threads aren't really conversations.

They're sequential monologues.

YouTube comments, however, often become conversations because they are easily broken into obvious threads. YouTube comments are visually organized like threads and the comments made by the video's poster are color-coded to show up distinctively. That makes it easy to follow the to-and-fro of conversations without too much hunting around. If you're interested in a single thread within a long series of comments it's easy to find, read and participate. If not, you can move along to the next thread. All in all, that experience makes the YouTube comment section feel much more interactive.

What's your experience of participating in long comment exchanges on blogs?

Comments

[Ken G.]

I've noticed the comment disparity as well. My most commented on blog posts tend to have fewer comments than my least popular videos.

I hadn't attributed it to the threaded, conversational set-up of YouTube comments, but that's something to think about.

If anything, I was looking at that as a sign of the futility of written communication in a world where nobody reads, and it's part of the reason why I've been putting far more energy into making videos than writing blogs lately. But, perhaps, I'll have to reconsider that.

[Kull]

Umm...by asking us to comment on this topic, you are asking for a disconcerting blog post!

No comment.

[Free Samples By Mail]

Hm...maybe people are interested more to videos than just a text. You know, a lot of people are interested more to audio visual nowadays. You're maybe right about how organized comments on YouTube. However, you can do the same with your blog. I've been commenting a lot of blogs and some of them are really organized and have different color per comments. I think there's a template that can make the comments show in different colored column.

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