My feeling was that SSC is getting close to LW in terms of popularity, but Alexa saysotherwise: SSC hasn’t yet cracked top 100k sites (LW is ranked 63,755) and has ~600 of links to it vs ~2000 for LW. Still very impressive for a part-time hobby of one overworked doctor. Sadly, 20% of searches leading to SSC are for heartiste.
My suspicion is that SSC would get a lot more traffic if its lousy WP comment system was better, but then Scott is apparently not motivated by traffic, so there is no incentive for him to improve it.
My suspicion is that SSC would get a lot more traffic if its lousy WP comment system was better, but then Scott is apparently not motivated by traffic, so there is no incentive for him to improve it.
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?
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 is overwhelming because it is poorly formatted and presented, not because of the volume. There are plenty of forums with better comment formatting, like reddit, userfriendly.org, or slashdot. Lack of comment ranking does not help readability, either.
I find that the bakot’s ~new~ on new comments and the dropdown list of new comments is enough to get by with—for me, the quantity really is the overwhelming aspect on the more popular posts.
My feeling was that SSC is getting close to LW in terms of popularity, but Alexa says otherwise: SSC hasn’t yet cracked top 100k sites (LW is ranked 63,755) and has ~600 of links to it vs ~2000 for LW. Still very impressive for a part-time hobby of one overworked doctor. Sadly, 20% of searches leading to SSC are for heartiste.
My suspicion is that SSC would get a lot more traffic if its lousy WP comment system was better, but then Scott is apparently not motivated by traffic, so there is no incentive for him to improve it.
SSC getting a lot more traffic might change it and not necessarily for the better.
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?
And what comment system would you advocate?
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.
The amount of comments can be rather overwhelming as it is. Do you want a larger SSC community, for the ideas to get a wider audience, or what?
It is overwhelming because it is poorly formatted and presented, not because of the volume. There are plenty of forums with better comment formatting, like reddit, userfriendly.org, or slashdot. Lack of comment ranking does not help readability, either.
I find that the bakot’s ~new~ on new comments and the dropdown list of new comments is enough to get by with—for me, the quantity really is the overwhelming aspect on the more popular posts.
Other forums have lots more comments, yet are easier to navigate through.