Comments

[tiger_spot]

Why is it that when I post sad things or angry things or other whining, I get lots and lots of comments, but when I post happy things I get maybe one comment per post? This seems to be more or less the opposite of how I'm used to conversations working in meatspace (modulo the differences between a post-comment structure and a conversational structure).

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Because, if you post negative things, people want to comfort you, but if you post positive things, people figure they're not needed?

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

But then what causes the difference in in-person interactions?

::answers own question::

Perhaps in person, people perceive a need to keep the conversation going, so they'll respond to happy things as well because they feel obliged to respond to anything. And then LiveJournal doesn't produce that sense of must-keep-conversation-going, because it isn't a conversation yet, just a post.

I would rather be in more conversations on LJ, but the structure doesn't support them very well.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And yet, LJ is much more conversation-friendly than most other blog formats.

Less conversation friendly than Usenet.

How does it stack up to, say, Facebook?

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how Facebook works, so I can't compare there. My understanding is that most of the social networking sites have pretty rudimentary commenting and aren't meant for discussion.

I do note that certain blogs support very good conversations (Making Light, say) without altering the standard blog-comment structure much. What helps there is that (a) it's fairly easy to tell what you've read and what you haven't (also true of Usenet, for most newsreaders, but not true of LJ) and (b) people expect there to be a conversation going on, so they'll come back later and read the replies since their last visit (true of everywhere that has good conversations; could be true of certain communities on LJ, but certainly not true for my journal at this time).

The only thing LJ has over Making Light's one-line-of-comments-with-datestamps is the branching; while that lets conversations develop simultaneously along several lines instead of focusing on one main line, which is nice, I don't think it encourages conversation as such.

The thing that annoys me most about LJ comments is the way they automatically collapse at a certain point and can't be expanded, instead having to be broken off into tiny little threadlets and read one at a time. That's very hard to follow.

Mainly I think the cultural factors are why I don't find group conversation on LJ much; it's not expected, so people don't go back once they've made their first comment. Two-person conversations like this one do happen, because of comment notification e-mails, but as a rule conversations with more than two participants don't happen much.

[brooksmoses]

Well, I do come back to the conversations later to see if anyone else has said anything, but it seems like mostly it's either that I don't have anything to say, or that the thread has sat dormant long enough that it seems dead and that nobody except the original poster and the person I'm replying to (if they've got comment-notification on) will see it, and that's sort of a sense of "the party has wandered away from here already".

I think the branching may encourage conversation a little bit, but on the other hand without some way of marking things read, I think it's an active detriment -- on a one-line-of-comments thing like Making Light, you only have to remember one place to figure out what you've read and what you haven't; on LJ, it's much harder. (Whereas, on Usenet, the software remembers for you and makes it quite clear, which is obviously the best solution.)

I have seen a threaded discussion board which kept a datestamp cookie for each user, and marked messages on the index page "NEW" based on whether they were newer than the last time the user had looked at the index page. But that's not a good solution unless there's only one main index for everything, which works on a bulletin board but not so much on a blog, unless the index includes the blog posts and the comment threads under all of them. Which actually might not be such a bad interface, really.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

the thread has sat dormant long enough that it seems dead and that nobody except the original poster and the person I'm replying to (if they've got comment-notification on) will see it, and that's sort of a sense of "the party has wandered away from here already"

Now see, that's exactly the cultural issue that makes LJ conversations harder. You don't expect anybody to read your comment. Nobody expects anybody to read comments on an old post, so they don't bother commenting, so there aren't any new comments to read, so no one expects there to be new comments to read, so they don't go check....

I think the branching may encourage conversation a little bit, but on the other hand without some way of marking things read, I think it's an active detriment

Absolutely. And it's not like LJ doesn't use cookies; they could implement some kind of datestamping easily.

Also, I think branching is helpful in places where the conversation is going off in several different directions, but things replying to blog posts tend to be focused on a specific topic, so there's not nearly as much need for it as on, say, Usenet.

[brooksmoses]

Now see, that's exactly the cultural issue that makes LJ conversations harder.

Yeah, indeed; that was sort of my point. At least with you I don't feel silly having a two-person conversation, though, and if someone else does join in, great.

On the cookies -- the problem is that you sort of need a datestamp for when you last read each set of replies, unless the system assumes that if you've read one you've read them all (which, while one may snarkily claim that's true for LJ drama-fests, is probably not a general rule that will keep people happy). And, if each LJ post is associated with its own set of replies, which it would pretty much have to be, then you end up with a cookie for each post that you read. And that probably quickly gets to be a startling lot of cookies.

[brooksmoses]

Addendum: The thing that particularly annoys me about LJ is how quickly threads die -- it seems like that, once a thread hasn't had posts for about 36 hours or so, it's unlikely that it will have any more ever, or at least not more than one or two.

Threads die on Usenet, too, but it usually takes at least a week, and a single post can often revive them.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

The thing that particularly annoys me about LJ is how quickly threads die

Yeah. "Hey, there was a perfectly good conversation here; where'd everybody go?"

[brooksmoses]

Exactly. Whereas this has a definite sense of ... weren't we saying something about unexpectedly finding ourselves in a small room with nobody else around (oh noes!) recently?

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

And here I was going to go inform people who might have swung by early that conversation was happening....

[brooksmoses]

Hee. I wouldn't object; we've plenty of other options. And people and proper multi-person conversations are good too!

[little--one.livejournal.com]

I think part of that stems from people having huge friend lists, such that you can really only consistently read through things once. Going back and checking all those old posts for conversations after the initial swing past would be too time consuming, especially when there usually isn't much in the way of continuing conversation.

Really, it seems like if you want to hold extended conversations with someone or a group of people, LJ just isn't the right medium. There are plenty of other places on the internet that are better suited for ongoing discussion.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Going back and checking all those old posts for conversations after the initial swing past would be too time consuming

Heavens, yes, that'd be a waste of time. Most of what gets posted on LJ isn't something that's going to sprout a conversation anyway -- it's trip reports and how-my-day-was and whining and stuff. For the most part, I read posts because I care what that person has to say, but I don't care nearly as much what all their friends have to say in response. Even posts that commenters might have a lot to say about aren't necessarily going to spark those commenters to say anything I'm interested in. I just wish that for those topics I think my friends' friends have interesting things to say about, there were more support for that kind of interaction.

I make heavy use of the "track this" button when I see something I think might spark conversation; that way I can get involved if one happens without wasting a bunch of time reloading pages that haven't changed. It is a relatively new feature; maybe the culture will adapt over time so that more people keep an eye on posts with conversation potential, so that more of those potential conversations will actually happen.

There are plenty of other places on the internet that are better suited for ongoing discussion.

This is true, but they're not All About Me.

[brooksmoses]

What I seem to end up doing is opening a tab for all the posts that look likely to spawn interesting conversation, and then every so often going back through them and reloading them and reading whatever's new and closing them if they seem to have stagnated.

This is part of why the short timescale of conversations on LJ annoys me; I tend to go back and check things two or three days later, and often by then if there was any conversation I'd like to reply to, it's "too late".

On the other hand, the "track this" thingy that tiger_spot is suggesting doesn't work that well for me either, because I like being able to read the new comments in branch-related chunks rather than one-at-a-time, and with the tracking it seems that I keep reading them as they come in. (Maybe there's a better way to do that, though.)

...

Actually, perhaps the best way to do this, for me, is to use the feature that Mozilla apparently has to check pages to see if they've updated. (Though I don't know if that works with LJ well or not.) Shame that I don't actually like Mozilla very much.

[tshuma]

The thing that annoys me most about LJ comments is the way they automatically collapse at a certain point and can't be expanded, instead having to be broken off into tiny little threadlets and read one at a time. That's very hard to follow.

If you use FireFox, there are addons (via GreaseMonkey and a couple of other things) that unfold all comments at once, and allow you to expand lj-cuts as well (one of my own pet peeves) on the same page as the one you're reading currently. I can try to look them up for you later, or you can hunt them down, but they're fairly easy to set up and use.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

If you use FireFox, there are addons (via GreaseMonkey and a couple of other things) that unfold all comments at once

Ooh! Must have!

FireFox addons do many very useful and pleasant things, but I've no idea how to look for them efficiently. Knowing this one exists ought to help me find it (it's much easier for me to look for something specific, rather than hope to run across something handy).

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

But, drat, the plugin I've found only expands comments one thread at a time. Which is better, but still a lot of clicking. I throw myself on the mercy of the tshuma....

[nolly.livejournal.com]

There is one with an "Unfold all" link, which I found the last time I went looking for one because I'd upgraded FF or was on a new machine or something. But it can be slooooow for a page with lots of threads; I kind of prefer the by-thread version.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Aha, worked it out -- there are settings. Fiendish little things.

I think I now have it set to automatically expand all comments; the only communities I can think of off the top of my head that routinely gather enough comments to test this on, however, I do not particularly want to test at work....

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

That is a big part of it. For me, there's also the time issue. To check for conversations, I'd pretty much have to re-read more than a day's worth of my friends list at a time, and that would take... well, forever, or close enough not to matter.

If there was a way to RSS the feed and if the RSS did what I wished RSS did (I have no idea what RSS does, actually, but I'm wondering if it can simply highlight "X has been updated"), then it might make conversations more likely.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the "track this" button? It'll let you know when there's a new comment on a post. Won't help if you're trying to notice every conversation, but if there's a particular post that seems likely, it's very handy for keeping an eye on it.