Comments? We Don’t Need No Stinken Comments

“First.”

“first”

“First!”

Top comments on most popular blogs-Little Green Footballs has banned this silly and pointless practice.

I wrote a blog post on Altered States of Consciousness and this post got around 13000 hits. For me this is the current record. I know, small potatoes for the Perez Hiltons and Boing Boings of the world. This story was on the front page of FARK. It got a handful of Diggs. It even got a few random Googlers looking at it. So, how many comments did I get from these 13000 or so visitors? On my blog, I got 5 comments. On FARK there were about 73 or so.

The bulk of the comments were along the lines of this is bullshit and don’t buy any of it. Some of the comments were yes, this is great. Some said you need personal instruction, and I just happen to be a personal instructor. A handful of comments were the kind I might have expected, yes, I have used this stuff and I like it too. Or wow, what a neat idea.

It’s fun to get and give comments on blogs-it can be a slow motion conversation and you can really get into the subject, or wander as far away from it as you want. I tend to move on once I have written a post myself, so if you leave a comment on a post from days, weeks, or months ago, you might not get a reply any time soon.

Getting a ton of comments seems to be one of the signs of hitting the Big Time. The Big Blogs get a hundred comments in minutes on every post, usually with a serious competition to be ‘first.’ Maybe I am just missing something here. What does it matter if you are you first to leave a comment? Does this get traffic to your site? Does this give you bragging rights over the other losers who want to be first? What is the deal?

Increase Your Website Traffic has some good ideas about comments, and ProBlogger has a Top Ten list on getting more comments.

Should I care that I seldom get more than a handful of comments on a post? I know that some bloggers don’t even use comments, are these bloggers missing out? Am I just writing blog posts that don’t invite comments? Is it a bad idea to insult blog commentors that like to say first?