Why do you think that’s the case? Are there any cases of blogger getting much more popular after switching to a different comment system?
It’s a good question, maybe it does not, I am not aware of any A/B testing done on that. I simply go by the trivial inconveniences.
And what comment system would you advocate?
Scott is against reddit-style karma system, so I’d go for Scott marking comments he finds interesting, at a minimum.
Additionally, comment formatting and presentation which improves nesting and visibility would be nice. Reddit/LW is an OK compromise, userfriendly.org is better in terms of seeing more threads at a glance.
Scott uses WP, and it has plenty of comment ranking plugins. Here is one popular blog with a simple open voting system: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog . It is probably not good enough for SSC, but many other versions are available. As I said, Scott is not interested in improving the commenting system, and probably is not interested in taking any steps beyond great writing toward improving the blog’s popularity, either.
It’s a good question, maybe it does not, I am not aware of any A/B testing done on that. I simply go by the trivial inconveniences.
Scott is against reddit-style karma system, so I’d go for Scott marking comments he finds interesting, at a minimum.
Additionally, comment formatting and presentation which improves nesting and visibility would be nice. Reddit/LW is an OK compromise, userfriendly.org is better in terms of seeing more threads at a glance.
There are many reasons against using the reddit code base. While it’s open source in theory it’s not structured in a way that allows easy updating.
Is there any solution that would be plug&play for a wordpress blog that you would favor Scott implementing?
Coding something himself would be more than a trival inconvenience.
I also think you underrate the time cost of comment moderation. Want to be a blogger and wanting to moderate a forum are two different goals.
Scott uses WP, and it has plenty of comment ranking plugins. Here is one popular blog with a simple open voting system: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog . It is probably not good enough for SSC, but many other versions are available. As I said, Scott is not interested in improving the commenting system, and probably is not interested in taking any steps beyond great writing toward improving the blog’s popularity, either.
That has voting but it doesn’t seem to have threaded comments. That means switching to that plugin would break all the existing comment threads.
I would guess that the main issue is that he doesn’t want to do work to improve it.
Arguing what’s an improvement also isn’t easy.
If I look at the blogs of influential people who do put effort into it, I don’t see that they all use a comment solution that Scott refuses to use.