How’s Everyone Liking the Comments?

Hey everyone. I rolled out a new comments system (in beta!) on Monday and it seems to have been well-received so far. I’ve fixed some of the most egregious bugs and rolled out some tweaks and it seems to be holding up pretty well. 🤞 (Is there a knock-on-wood emoji?)

It’s early days and I’m rolling things out slowly (only ~10 posts were open for comments this week out of about 50), but commenting activity waned as the week went on. Discovery is still poor (there’s no list of open comment threads) and there aren’t any notifications — even as an admin user, I have to go to the front page of the site and click into individual threads to see if there’s anything new. That’s an obvious hinderance to participation and I’m gonna make a first pass at fixing it next week.

I also recognize that it’s tough for readers to make room for a new online social space. People have their routines with Mastodon, Threads, Reddit, Instagram, etc. and each of those spaces has different social norms and unspoken rules. Getting used to a new space and learning what it’s “for” takes time. At the end of the day, it’s on me to facilitate discussion here. I’m not used to writing posts to spark conversation and it’s gonna take some time for that muscle to develop and to find a balance — I don’t want the site to become a series of prompts. (“Here’s a cool thing about giraffes. Do YOU like giraffes?” 🥴)

Like LLMs, we’ve all been trained on contemporary social media and tend to interact online in that way now. But per the community guidelines, I’m asking us to try for a slightly different sort of discussion:

There are three types of feedback I get often via email or social media that I love: 1) when someone sends me a link related to something I’ve shared (often with a short explanation/summary), 2) when a reader with expertise about something I’ve posted about shares their knowledge/perspective, or 3) when someone tells a personal story or shares an experience they had related to a post or link. When readers share this sort of constructive feedback, it improves the original post so much…that’s what I want to happen with comments on kottke.org.

The internet is full of places for people to go to express their opinions or argue about others’ opinions, so I’d like to steer away from that here. If we can prioritize talking about facts, sharing stories, experiences, and expertise over opinions, it’ll make for better, more informative threads.

I’d also like folks participating in threads to think a little bit less about what you might want out of making a comment and a little bit more about how your comment might help improve the community’s understanding of the topic at hand.

When I think about the posts & comments on social sites that I’m most interested in, they’re often experiences/personal stories, informed opinion, or, my personal favorite, links to related content. I’m gonna share some comments from this past week that hit these marks. First is Steven’s comment in the best 50 bars thread:

Our friend Kate Mikkelson has been tracking the best bars for years and maintaining her own list which may be of some relevance here. We were just in Brooklyn and while we didn’t make it to any of the bars on the most recent list we did go to Long Island Bar (twice) and had the best martini we’ve ever had, and enjoyed a great meal with excellent cocktails at Maison Premiere. Probably the best bar we’ve been to in recent memory was Artillery, in Savannah, but we’ve been lucky to visit many others, both with Chris and Kate and without, mostly in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Austin.

An excellent link, some context, and a little personal story.

I loved everyone sharing their favorite music videos in this thread. It took some cajoling by Caroline, but the thread got instantly better for everyone when people started sharing links to the videos they were talking about. Sharing links is a form of Showing Your Work and it only takes a few additional moments.

Though it contains fewer than 10 comments, I thought the best thread of the week was on the What a Japanese Neighborhood Izakaya Is Like post. I easily could have pinned every comment in the thread but I’ll highlight two here. First, this one by Thom:

One of the best gift’s a friend ever gave me was (silently) insisting we always meet at the same coffee shop. Over time, the connections we created and overall vibe of doing so spilled into other aspects of my life, especially when I travel. Usually when you go somewhere new you want to try as many things as possible. But I try and go to the same place repeatedly, glorying in the warmth of them learning my name, picking up on what I like to order, and finally telling me about things I should check out they think I’d like.

I don’t know if it’s a skill to do so, but, having now moved between cities and countries multiple times in my life, it’s my first objective when I find a new home. Go somewhere enough times until they know my name. In this small way it feels like my spending money there matters more than it would in a place where the staff turnover even day by day would make this impossible.

And Josh:

Love this. I recently stumbled onto a show on Netflix called Midnight Dinner about a guy who runs a Izakaya (though I didn’t know what it was called until this post). It follows the stories of his regulars and has been warm comfort TV as the nights get colder. Y’all might appreciate it as I’ve been doing.

https://youtu.be/OCGDVHjPX0c?si=uwWlyCbDRgFH7cpC

I’ve added Midnight Dinner to my Netflix queue — I hadn’t heard of it before. Comments like these make whatever posts I’ve written so much better — many thanks to these readers and everyone that else that took the time to comment this week.

I’ve been working nights and weekend for the past few weeks to get this thing going, quite happily for the most part, but I’m wiped. So I’m taking the rest of the day off (aside from one more post (with comments on!) after this one) to get a few things done around the house, do a bit of reading, and go watch my daughter play soccer. I’ll see you next week!

• kottke.org