So this post seemed to get a pretty healthy number of comments. I think others have suggested the idea of discussion prompts or discussion questions to engage commenters at the end of the post; maybe just having this post say “I want more comments” played a similar role. I was implicitly assuming that readership and comment numbers track each other closely, but maybe that’s not true. It might be interesting to analyze the LW article database and see how ratios between viewership, comments, and votes have changed over time.
See Writing that Provokes Comments. I think this post was something more people felt qualified to have opinions on, dealt with (an aspect of) social reality/coordination (which people are primed to care about), and left concrete things to do in the comments section. (either in the form of disagreement or proposing solutions)
I think it was mostly due to the topic, which was important and something that lots of people felt a desire to follow and contribute to. (Though I agree discussion prompts are good.)
So this post seemed to get a pretty healthy number of comments. I think others have suggested the idea of discussion prompts or discussion questions to engage commenters at the end of the post; maybe just having this post say “I want more comments” played a similar role. I was implicitly assuming that readership and comment numbers track each other closely, but maybe that’s not true. It might be interesting to analyze the LW article database and see how ratios between viewership, comments, and votes have changed over time.
See Writing that Provokes Comments. I think this post was something more people felt qualified to have opinions on, dealt with (an aspect of) social reality/coordination (which people are primed to care about), and left concrete things to do in the comments section. (either in the form of disagreement or proposing solutions)
I think it was mostly due to the topic, which was important and something that lots of people felt a desire to follow and contribute to. (Though I agree discussion prompts are good.)