Before the rise of social media as the web’s public conversation space, where I felt it happened well, was across the comment space of blogs. As distributed as it was, it might have been a “distribuverse”- and was woven together by the use of hyperlinks and maybe trackback pings.
Given the abuse of comment spammers making it a PITA to manage, many bloggers turn them off, or use some fancy new hip static publisher that does no support comments (aka D’Arcy). Or it happens away from the publishing source, maybe tied back with something like ActivityPub. There the depth of the response is thin, quick, all the intensity of an emoji or some meme gif.
So when I get a genuine, non spam blog comment from a real person, with maybe complete sentences that indicate they actually read what I wrote, not glancing at in during a scroll session, it’s quite a gift.
What’s funny is that you can write long and hard on something you think is insightful or profound or will instigate reactions… goes out with an un-commented thud. And then some little piece you just write quickly on a whim or a weird hunch, draws a long train of comments.
That’s the kind of post that drew a comment today, Secrets Beneath a Chair where flipping over a piece of furniture uncovered some curious numbers that opened up a whole world of people who cherish Temple-Stuart furniture… even drawing in the grandson of the company that made the chair.
Someone named Karina wrote
Alan, that is so cool! I sit here reading and think of all the hard working people that made both of your chairs; probably made just days or weeks apart. Real furniture! Not flimsy imported stuff!
https://cogdogblog.com/2017/03/secrets-beneath-a-chair/#comment-1262580
The weird thing about the comments are half express their love of the old American Brown Furniture and orthers try to pitch sales of theirs. In in other blogged words:
In the long ago heralded ages of blogging as something that necessitated having a blog, I wrote about Comment As Blogging after reading (in his blog) a stunning example of what Matthew Kirschenbaum described as “Comment Blogging” — where a colleague named François Lachance blogged in the comment space of other people’s blogs:
I can predict the range of theoretical positions such a “blog”(should we call it a comment blog?) might be said to occupy: this is blogging in the margins, distributed blogging at the interstices of the discourse network. François appears on no one’s blogroll, his entries are not tracked by blogdex or weblogs.com or similar sites. He is an utter non-entity in the standard ecological renderings of the blogosphere, yet he unquestionably has a presence “here.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20060213022358/http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000215.html
I took this on as a little mission for four years after reading this, I would take a week to turn off writing on my own blog and instead spend the week writing bits in the comments of other blogs.
I’m thinking as a new old experiment of striking up again this old habit. At the time, I did some database query tricks to generate the comment activity on my own blog. I had not really updated in a while that I updated and track in a google sheet. Here’s the comment trend on CogDogBlog, peak commenting was 2011.
Luckily with my MySQL rust, I had copied the formulas ino the sheet, just the date ranges need be altered for different years, examples below for 2023 data
Total Number of Posts in a Year
SELECT count( * )
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE post_date >= '2023-01-01'
AND post_date < '2024-01-01'
AND post_type='post'Total Number of Comments in a Year
SELECT count( * )
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_date` >= '2023-01-01'
AND `comment_date` < '2024-01-01'
Total Number of Commenters in a Year
SELECT count( * )
FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE post_date >= '2023-01-01'
AND post_date < '2024-01-01'
AND post_type='post'Who’s Your Commenters?
Part of my old process was recognizing those who gave me comments. I resurrected the old query for 2023’s activiy, which matches the low end of the curve of activity. This is the query:
SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_date` >= '2023-01-01'
AND `comment_date` < '2024-01-01'
GROUP BY comment_author
ORDER BY acnt DESC;
The few who still comment and also commented here include (note, this list was updated as it was faulty!):
- cogdog 71
- Stephen Downes 10
- D’Arcy Norman 9
- Tom 4
- Eric Likness 4
- John 4
- Kevin Hodgson 3
- Brian 3
- Algot Runeman 2
- Jim Groom 2
- Dave Lane 2
- Tineke 2
- Kate Bowles 2
- midlaj 2
- TERRY ELLIOTT 2
- Paul R. Pival 1
- Mark Ahlness 1
- Steven Crawford 1
- stuart 1
- Robert C Gordon 1
Draw your own conclusions.
What Posts Have Gotten The Most Comments?
While I was remembering how to query direcly in PHPmyAdmin, I tried to fumble through a query to do this; I knew it needed to join the comments table and the eposts table. Of course everybody these days reach for ChatGPT. I got there just as or more quickly using the old fashioned google search which everyone says does not work anymore, but shrug using “wordpress sql to find posts with the most comments”
I found most of it in the second google result, a link to Stack Overflow. Since i was written for PHP, I had to rename the tables, and I removed the condition for just the last week since I want all time.
My query worked (with extra SELECT statements to label results, get te blog URL, and the year:
SELECT comment_count as count, ID, post_title as title, guid as URL, DATE_FORMAT(post_date, "%Y") as year
FROM `wp_posts`, `wp_comments`
WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_comments.comment_post_ID
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY comment_count DESC
LIMIT 0, 10;
Saving the results I got a table of my top 10 most commented posts:
| count | ID | title | URL | year |
| 96 | 6454 | Into the Great Wide Open | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=6454 | 2011 |
| 76 | 9103 | The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9103 | 2012 |
| 62 | 9371 | Meet Rachel… Anne…Tiffany… from Card Holder … | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9371 | 2012 |
| 61 | 64254 | Secrets Beneath A Chair | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=64254 | 2017 |
| 48 | 4786 | Join Me- Ban Spam Supporters Ubiquity Hosting From… | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=4786 | 2010 |
| 42 | 4881 | The Seven Circles of Canon Rebate Hell | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=4881 | 2010 |
| 40 | 54073 | Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=54073 | 2016 |
| 38 | 48472 | Facebook as Catfish Paradise: Its Community Standa… | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=48472 | 2015 |
| 37 | 5759 | More Than Something to Share(ski): Make a Mark | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=5759 | 2010 |
| 35 | 9476 | The Question Should be: Why Are You *Not* Blogging | http://cogdogblog.com/?p=9476 | 2012 |
More of this was more my own self satisfaction of seeing if I could still wrangle my way around the WordPress database.
But more is a recommitment to being a gift giver of blog comments. I’m going to pick a week soon to revive my comment blogging challenge. Getting blog comments are gifts and worth gifting it forward.
Featured Image: Yup, one of mine, near as I can figure by adjacent photos in flickr, this was the visi to Jerome Arizona I did the year Cori first visited me. Find Gifts Where The Are flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
My blog is probably a little more than half your blog’s age (20210 start) and I feel this so much about the comments. For over 2000+ posts, the pay off in comments has been minimum. That said, I also realize that there are secondary comments that happen that don’t get captured on the blog such as social media where when I share it or someone else share’s it, a conversation ensues.
Still, that isn’t as exciting as getting comments on one’s own blog.
It’s interesting because we get age old “don’t read the comments” and I’m over here being like “what comments?!?!?!”.
I also wonder about how much of this has to do with the dissemination challenge. A lot of blogs don’t have email-to-reader feature and RSS readers are still very niche (which I’ll never get why). So getting to a post is a challenge enough that one might not want to comment. Or maybe it’s just folks aren’t reading fully through or finding themselves of having anything meaningful to contribute (are we actually practicing, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”?!??!!?).
I totally agree that outward responses are nice but a comment in the blog is more, it’s almost like getting a warm postal message.
And that’s right! I had forgot the idea of how people even read. RSS is still so useful and efficient I am floored that it has faded. They are less common in search results (it seems).
I guess the difference is in social streams the blogs have to be pushed (algorithmically to you) to respond but when someone comments on a blog they come to visit you.
Its a past er, not gone completely. No illusions it will be like 2010. Thanks for the comment gift, Lance.
I like your idea of the ‘distribuverse’ which sounds more decentralized than the single big stream where only the server machines are different. To me, blog comments and trackbacks have preserved a ‘sense of place’ and felt like someone visiting me on my ‘front porch’. Via activitypub, I don’t know how to specify whether I want to leave a full copy of my contribution (as a omment) or just a pointer to a longer post (as a pingback).
Indeed it is a home! Rather than going to a big venue where music is blasted to everybody it’s more like friends dropping by to make music on that porch. Keep the blog lights on
Just call me five
Kevin
I didn’t comment at all? That seems so unlike me!
On my own blog and newsletter I almost never get comments, not even from the social media feeds (I do get likes and replies from time to time on Mastodon, but not for my newsletter).
I’ve taken to posting a lot of comments on Reddit, where I can engage in interesting conversation with the bots and trolls.
Oi, that seems wrong, you comment lots. I have to check my queries.
Gulp. You were right, Stephen. I had incorrect dates in my query, You were top of the heap in 2023 with 10 comments on CogDogBlog.
As number 2 on the List. I approve this message. #notAbot
Comment. And blog when you can, when you feel the spirit.
All media go in cycles, this one will come around again. Radio, vinyl, tapes (maybe one day even Newspapers!_)
Oh and I think the 60,000 times blog post deserves to be one of those questions enshrined in the lore of the Internet. Like one of those long time unsolvable cold cases. Maybe someone somewhere will discover some thread, some DNA that brings that claim to justice.
All trails lead back to a business guy named Philip Cooper (speaking of commenting, the lead came from one named “Buster”). He’s some investment consultant not sure if he is at MIT Sloan school. I am sure he knows, but never responded to emails, even voice mails left https://cogdogblog.com/2015/03/dialed-back-to-1982/
Also for fun, his MS thesis at MIT (1984) was on the use of AI for startups. Funny ha
I agree with you Alan about the gift of a comment on the blog. As Robert T. Schuetz’ once said,
Comments are like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms, the sugary goodness that adds flavor to our day. Comments turn posts into conversations. Sometimes, these conversations turn into friendships, and sometimes these friendships span the globe.
Source: Comments are the Marshmallows by Robert T. Schuetz
I remember in the past at the end of each year I would go through all my comments and collate the bits that stood out. I managed to do this for four years (2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017), but then it fell on the way side I guess. I wonder if one of the challenges is the way in which comments and general conversation have become distributed over the years? Ironically, looking back, it is sad how comments on platforms such as Disqus have been lost to time. Personally, I find something in writing my comments on my own site these days and POSSEing them elsewhere, although it means I do not always get around to commenting as much as I would like.
It feels like one of the major breaks in comments is the hassle in getting the comment-on-the-comment notification. I come back to your site when I remember and look for a response but that’s pretty much just for your site.
We used to have the subscribe to comments email option but that’s gone away on most sites and getting it in email sucked anyway. I wish that I had an RSS reader that integrated commenting and auto-subscribed me to the comments for posts that I commented on.
I’m humbly honored I get a comeback! Yeah, the following is pretty wretched. Do you remember CoComment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoComment
I was considering trying something like pasting in some unique ID string in comments to see if web search could find them.
I guess the IndieWeb stuff tries to do that, but it always feels messy and why do I want to track a bunch of clicks of like buttons.
Maybe that it is messy and requires extra labor keeps it special. Shrug. Can I be a footnote on someone else’s blog? 😉
Hope you tromp back here soon.
I reluctantly turned off comments on my blog about a year ago. I did so for a few reasons. The spam was getting sneakier is one. The other is people just weren’t commenting very often anymore. I wished they still did, but my wishes weren’t heard, and whether true or not, the lack of comments made my post feel like a dud in the void.
I’ve considered turning them back on, but I don’t know. AI-generated comments sneak through a lot of filters I’m seeing. Hopefully the tech catches up.
Oh I fully understand, it’s a choice we at least get to make if we have our own blog. And indeed the spam to real comment ratio is a large number, but I find the few genuine ones that sneak in under the flood, are so worth it to me to keep ’em open. Luckily, my slice of fame is very thin!