I made some observations about why commenting is cool for some and not others:
Observations
- Commenting is great when there’s a specific question to give the crowd a push, such as Quora and StackOverflow (SO); Those two are driven mostly by specific questions, while news outlets will post a 5 to 10 paragraph article of informative news and that’s it. Comments in the news sites are all blurbs and rants and the quality feels low or at least uncertain; for Quora and SO, there’s a sense of legitimacy, ie. the top comment in the page is from a guy with 20 yrs experience. While going over comments in the news sites, i sometimes wonder if i’m dealing with a misinformed housemom in the mid-West and don’t even bother rebuking her.
- In Quora and StackOverflow, we see the comments immediately to hook in users.
- All sites practically use some sort of ranking system to boost some comments up.
- In my opinion, commenting is cool on sites like Facebook, Quora, and StackOverflow because there’s a sense of comradery. Also, you know your comment will be seen or make an impact bc of the small community, or even a “community within a community.” What i mean by this is, for example, something like my fraternity. I’m in a house with about 35 other guys, but i’m close to about 5 guys. The point is that current news sites sometimes make u feel like your 2 cents won’t matter or be seen at all, whereas Quora and SO does. Think of Facebook’s model when friends comment on a picture or status: it’s just a handful of ppl who all know each other and they can all talk to each other. I don’t know if this is something worth more consideration later btw.
For Quora, it builds that model too when you and your friends with same interests scan the same topics, but i feel this isn’t as big (maybe i’m not an active, long-term user); i felt more of the comradery in Quora and StackOverflow–ppl with the same interest that you can EASILY trust.
The other thing i noticed is that on Quora, i navigated to questions i knew i could answer or questions that peaked my curiosity. The sense of being able to gain by CONTRIBUTING or LEARNING was what kept me poking around.
Focusing on StackOverflow, there’s an abundance of analysis, the most recent from Professor Bjoern Hartmann’s research Design Lessons from the Fastest Q&A Site in the West
Excerpt:
Q&A On Other Sites Is Often Not About Factual Knowledge
Several distinct types of questions on Q&A sites can be distinguished: factual (seeking objective data); advice, (seeking recommendations); opinion, (seeking others’ viewpoints), and non-questions (spam) [11,15,21]. Significant parts of general Q&A sites are conversational; the sites perform poorly on focused technical questions [21]. Algorithms to distinguish between informational and conversational threads have been proposed [11,25]. We do not investigate such distinctions as SO explicitly (and successfully) discourages conversational contributions.Sites Leverage Both Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations
Motivations of individuals who contribute answers to Q&A sites can be categorized as either intrinsic (altruism, the desire to learn) or extrinsic (gaining status, monetary rewards) [14,21,23]. Point systems and other game mechanics are frequently used extrinsic motivators. Adding monetary rewards can transform the user’s sense of the system from a social interaction space to a more formal transaction space [14]. Stack Overflow has several highly