What is an insightful comment worth if nobody reads it?
If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a noise?
I remember, maybe about a decade ago, being annoyed that Facebook had begun showing my comments in other people's timelines. Eventually, I got used to it but as an introvert, I never understood why they did that. Perhaps, until now:
Here on Steem, as I already noted:
(Feed-Reach is zero for comments and replies)
The consequence of this is that comments and replies have a near-zero chance of being seen by more than a few participants in a conversation. The reverse of that is that the cost per feed for comments and replies can be seen as infinity.
It's an obvious point, but maybe not insignificant? Simply put, maybe it's the case that storing comments and replies with near-zero reach in a social media platform is expensive and inefficient?
Coincidentally, I already started to address this point with the Steem Conversation Accelerator (SCA), but as a result of the new "feed-reach" metrics, I'm thinking that maybe it's more important for the blockchain than I had realized?
What do you think? Should developers prioritize efforts that could bring "reach" to comments and replies?
Yes, I also think that comments often have few readers. In my case, I only read comments or comments on comments if the post was interesting to me and I am therefore interested in the discussion. But maybe I belong to the dying generation that still reads posts at all :-)
I wonder how we could increase the reach of comments. An insertion like you wrote above is probably not a good idea. Maybe some kind of extra menu item for trending comments?
Yeah, that's one possibility I was thinking about. I guess there are several possible approaches that people could experiment with. It would be interesting to see different platforms try for unique approaches to the problem. Another thing that might help would be the ability to resteem comments. It seems like it wouldn't be hard at all to add support for that.
Gelesen... 😜
Wenn, dann lass' uns gemeinsam aussterben...
:-)
I definitely think there are issues with the way things are structured here, metaphorically it seems to me that the containers where things are happening are frequently the wrong size so there's either too much or too little pressure for reactions to happen well. But rather than technical solutions it may make more sense to look at the social/culture layer first, maybe take a cue from the old-school blogosphere and popularize the idea of posting roundups or digests that end up surfacing interesting conversations.
The social layer definitely offers a quick & dirty way to give more visibility to comments, so it would be great to see that posting style emerge. Of course, it's survival would probably come down to curation support, which may or may not be available.
But even something like a digest post could be facilitated with technology improvements. For example, with the right app, I could spend a half-hour reading comments and clicking checkboxes for the ones that I wanted to incorporate into a digest post, and then when I'm ready to write about it, the app could import links and excerpts into a new post, and maybe even make beneficiary settings for comment authors.
I don't really see this as an either/or proposition between technology and social... more like "both of the above".
Trust me I can tell from personal experience that it can really be frustrating when you put good amount of time in a comment and it was ignored and not read
Не знаю как это сделано в Фейсбуке, но мне очень не хватает ленты комментариев для избранных пользователей. Я бы назвала их "Интересные комментаторы".
On Facebook and Twitter, I guess they try to pick out the interesting comments and surface them in the regular feed. I was also thinking along the lines of a separate feed for comments. Automatically picking out the interesting ones would be a challenge, though...
Хотя если бы комментарии получали апы, они могли бы попадать в ленту. Любопытно.
That might be a good starting point.