No Comment, In Which I Disappear Up My Own Fundament

I rather blew my chance of a good, meaty post today by using up a lot of the material in reply to a couple of very interesting posts by Kaylriene and Naithin. Looking at it from a Blaugust advice on blogging point of view, it exemplifies a perennial problem: when to comment and when to post.

A blogging "scene" requires certain key elements to sustain itself: enough people blogging to create a critical mass, a significant degree of interaction between them and a willingness to share. Get all those in place and you have a good chance of a stable community maintained by synergies that are self-sustaining.

Bouncing off other peoples' posts is an essential element. It's also crucial that, when doing so, each blogger not only credits their inspiration but links to the source. That's how blogs find new readers and readers find new blogs.

Commenting is also deeply important. Comments validate the effort of the blogger who wrote the post that inspired them and let them know that someone out there is not only reading but paying attention. More importantly, comments create conversations.

Individual blogs can exist perfectly happily in a void. If you're keeping a personal journal there's really no need for readers. Blogger actually has settings that allow you to make your blog available only to invited readers or even to make it unavailable and invisible to anyone but you.

I have absolutely no doubt that there are people out there knocking out thousands or even hundreds of thousands of words every year that no-one ever sees. Not everyone wants other people reading their diary, after all.

Random shot from Kingdoms of Amalur because you have to break the text up with something.

By definition those private bloggers don't matter to anyone but themselves. Effectively, for the rest of us, they don't exist. Everyone else likes a bit of feedback and if there's going to to be a blogosphere or a scene, the feedback needs to form a loop.

Most of the time I have no problem encouraging and facilitating that. I habitually bounce off other bloggers and spray links in all directions. It's one of the best ways to keep a blog lively and current.

Not infrequently, though, I find myself facing a minor dilemma. I'll be reading a post that piques my interest and I'll start writing a comment, because I can no more resist the sound of my own voice than I can breathe treacle.

As I get stuck in and the comment grows longer and more convoluted, it will occur to me that a) comments shouldn't have a dozen paragraphs and b) I could probably turn what I'm writing into a full post. At that moment I have to decide which way to go and it's not always a straightforward decision.

I often think it's a bit rude to remove a lengthy comment from consideration without the blogger in question having any idea it was ever there. If other bloggers are anything like me they'll cherish their comments, metaphorically rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck in his money pit. It's cruel to deprive anyone of that pleasure even if they never find out.

My solution is often to write a very short comment saying I was going to write a longer one but then I decided to turn it into a post of my own. I'm never sure how welcome that really is. It could sound a bit like someone telling you they had a great idea for a birthday present for you but after they bought it they realized they liked it so much they decided to keep it. And then gave you a photo of them using and enjoying it. As your present.

It's getting prettier as I get further in.

On the other hand, discovering that a post you've written has inspired or provoked another blogger into a response post of their own is at least as satisfying as receiving a comment. More so if it's a good post that expands on the subject, as when Everwake posted something on Developer Appreciation Week which referenced my post on the same subject.

Then there's the question of how much you really want to write the post. It takes me about five per cent of the time to write even a lengthy comment than it would to put a full post together. I freestyle comments and don't read them back (as you can easily tell from the high incidence of typos, spelling and grammatical errors).

Even if I've already written an overlong comment running to a few hundred words the chance of cannibalizing any of it to cut and paste into a post is minimal. I sometimes try but it's more trouble than it's worth. Easier to start again from scratch.

It does sometimes occur to me to leave the whole comment in situ and then do the post as well but somehow that never sits quite right. It leaves me with the strange feeling I've just plagiarized myself. And it seems a bit of a cheat, as if I'm trying to get double credit, although from whom I couldn't tell you.

In both cases today, bashing out comments to Kaylriene and Naithin, I had in mind the amount of effort it would take to do a proper post on the highly nuanced and complex issue of Sandbox versus Themepark gameplay. I had ideas sparking like lightning across my synapses and I was uncomfortably aware of the minimal likelihood of any of them being amenable to tamping down.

Also, I'm absolutely certain I've pontificated at considerable length about this subject before. Several times. Not that that would stop me but I knew that if I wasn't going to just repeat my established position and trot out some of the same well-worn anecdotes I'd have to go and do some primary research.

Also hotter, drier and dustier. And more orange.

I do a lot of research. I enjoy it and I really hate getting facts wrong. I actually did some research even to comment on Naithin's post, because I was refuting something another commenter, Quin, had said and I wanted to be sure I wasn't talking through my hat.

As a complete aside and also an illustration of how rabbit holes can open up under your feet at any time, when I tabbed back to Time to Loot to get the above link to Quin's comment, I clicked on his name and it took me to his blog, Where The Monsters Are. I had seen his name as a commenter before but I had no idea he had a blog, let alone one in which his latest post is a direct counterpart to my DAW post (linked above, let's not over-egg it), taking almost the opposite stance on exactly the same developer.

Where The Monsters Are looks like a very interesting blog indeed and I immediately added it to my blog roll, not least because I'm already on his. If anyone else has me on their blog roll and I haven't reciprocated, please nudge me.

Unfortunately, when I checked to see if it had worked I couldn't see Quin's blog anywhere. I scrolled all the way down to the bottom and there it was, showing the most recent post as this from seven years ago. I fiddled around for a while but I couldn't get Blogger to recognize the current WTMA. Anyone with any ideas on how to fix it please let me know. It works fine in Feedly...

Getting back to the point, assuming I ever had one or could remember it if I did, sometimes a comment is all you really need but sometimes it takes a full post to get your message across. Knowing when to break out and when to tuck in is an art rather than a science. I'm still working on it.

Then again, you can always comment first then spiral off into a post that's tangentially related at best. That works too!