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 3 years ago 

I'm in agreement with both of you.

If you see your comments bring you nothing (or bring you smth less valuable than your life time... or less valuable then smth else that you could do during the same period of time) -- soon you will cancel that.

This is absolutely true. You need to enjoy it. If you have a blog somewhere else and people engage with it, you might as well move it here and earn a couple of dollars for what you were doing anyway.

When I joined, I asked an older user if they'd prefer to receive upvotes or comments (I was receiving upvotes and no comments). They replied "a bit of both". I wanted comments - others wanted money.

I've enjoyed the comments to this article. I enjoy the debate and it's clear that everybody has slightly different motivations / expectations and experiences here. Having followed @o1eh since he joined, I know there's been a challenge in knowing what path to take. I chose my path when I joined and decided it would be a different path to what everybody else was doing.

Because there are 1000 posters vs 1 reader here

I was curious about this type of ratio earlier today and analysed a number of posts over a 12 hour period. 57 posts in total. I'd like you to guess how many comments were made (excluding voting services and moderators)and the average number of words for each comment.

I'd like you to guess how many comments were made (excluding voting services and moderators)and the average number of words for each comment.

how many well-developed, non skin-deep, intresting, heart-touching and time-consuming comments were made?..

well, as I am a pessimist... my bet is: one to zero.
ofc, I would be happy if I am wrong here.
other questions are: how much these certain folks gonna carry out, and were their posts / accounts rewarded for doing so (the last cannot be measured at all, I totally admit this myself - so this might be a metaphysical question).

I just see what I see with my own eyes. I can name myself... well, lets say: 4 to 6 Russian users that are truly engaged. So, maybe the true proportion isnt like I said. Note, I said: figurally... just to describe the schema. @datych, wanna come to join the conversation? but I feel ashamed myself to alert you on this, cause your life time is precious too...

 3 years ago 

I'll hold off sharing the answer to give o1eh (and maybe even datych) an opportunity to reply. Or maybe I'll sneak it into my next post as a mini-contest (I like to hide contests in my posts to reward people who take the time to read them 🙂).

I'm sure @datych has kept up with all of my posts and is taking his time to think of the most entertaining reply - isn't that right? 😉

 3 years ago 

I think in 12 hours there can be about 20 comments. I mean comments of sentence length and more. And if you take into account the comments under the posts of the curators, it will be even more.

 3 years ago 

@qwerrie, @o1eh - So the 57 posts were all more than 12 hours old (so had slid down the feed) and were between 12 and 24 hours old. Excluding bidvote comments and moderators, there were 8 comments. Average length of 10 words.

E.g. "What a lovely day it is today for going out"
Or
"I really like your photo of a bug's head"

I.e. Not exactly high value comments. Maybe one of them was a full sentence and the rest were 2 words (I excluded the post where the author had replied "great post" to himself (twice)).

 3 years ago 

Wow, the statistics are worse than I thought.

 3 years ago 

It doesn't look good and I'd say WOX is one of the more interactive communities. I think it shows how significant the moderators contribution is to keep things interesting - I'm hoping there's something we can do to shift the dynamic. Too many are taking - Too few are giving.

 3 years ago 

Maybe it would be good to make a contest of the best comments and choose 3 - 5 best comments every week and award the authors. Although it will not radically change the situation.

 3 years ago 

I have a few ideas and an ongoing contest certainly feels like one that could work 👍

 3 years ago 

Great, every contest is an incentive for growth.

1 day is not representative stats, but no surprise for a pessimist like me. 8-)

 3 years ago 

I did a bit more analysis earlier this morning over a 2 day time period with every post 2-3 days old - 146 posts. Hopefully I'll have a bit of time to write about it over the weekend.