Over the last year or so I have noticed that comments on blog posts even extremely popular ones have become few and far between. This has bothered me more than you can possibly understand because I truly enjoy the discussion that flows in a good comment thread. I actually take the time to read each response and try to offer my own perspective on the commentators insight.
Therefore, I have spent the recent weeks and months researching the issue and I have arrived a one solitary conclusion. The conversation has moved from the blog to social media. In addition as a result of the Facebookification of the world people are resorting to the ‘like’ effect.
“Perhaps people are just afraid to leave comments?”
What this means is that if I share the link and title of an article on Facebook, then people will ‘likel the link and possibly reshare it there. Additionally they will discuss the article in their Facebook circles and not on the actual blog where the article originally appeared. This is a great travesty because the social site is sapping the life out of the blogs that share content. Ultimately as bloggers become disenchanted with their blogs there will be less interesting content shared and the parasite that is Facebook will continue to starve from the meaningless drivel that most people post on the network.
Now to say that this is entirely a Facebook phenomena would be completely inaccurate at best. A similar situate has evolved on Twitter where people will retweet your shared link and title sometimes adding a hashtag as a comment on the article. Other times they will share and reply to your share with a comment about the shared post. Essentially the same effect as the aforementioned ‘Like.’
Then there’s GooglePlus which is essentially the same situation as Facebook, however; in lieu of like’s we have +1’s. If I share an article on g+ odds are most people will only +1 the share some will comment on the post but at this point in time there is not commentary filtering back into the article.
And then there’s LinkedIn. Wash rinse repeat. It’s all the same.
The problem is that those of use who take the time to craft interestingly insightful content are being robbed of the feedback we need to continue developing said content in the first place. The state of the social internet has done more to kill blogging than any other system before.
Ultimately, the bottom line is that people are like electricity following the path of least resistance. Why comment on a blog post where the author may take offense, when I can just reshare it to my close circle of friends, who think and believe as I do, to be part of the conversation. Why should I risk offending the rest of the internet?