Entry tags:
How To Make Discussion Happen On DW
Okay, so this is a post I've had in my WIPs for over four years (under the title "how ot get comment", if you want a glimpse of my working methods...), and I think I have finally figured out how I want to say what I want to say in it, and this seems like a good time to get it out there. But of course I gave myself a deadline to get it posted and now it's after 2 AM so it's probably not as polished as that four years of drafts deserves!
Also, I remember the last time december meme happened, my reading page suddenly got so busy I could barely keep up, but now we've got that and tumblr returnees at the same time, and I am actually behind on my DW reading page! This hasn't happened in probably half a decade! It's great, but also AUGH, I am behind on my DW reading page and I've also got so much stuff to do.
So, this is basically fifteen years' of trial-and-error learning on how to make dreamwidth posts that will produce good comment discussions involving lots of people. After fifteen years, I am at the point where if I'm sitting at home feeling depressed and in need of human conversation, I can make a DW post and have enough comment notifications to keep me in ego boost for several days. And a lot of what makes this work is just fairly simple strategies that I wish more people knew.
There's two basic principles to bear in mind going in. The first is that leaving a comment requires both effort and risk on the part of the person commenting, and your goal is to lower that threshhold of both risk and effort as far as possible. Anything that makes it easier, or makes it feel safer, for someone to take part in the discussion is good. Anything that takes work, risk, or cognitive load away from them and shifts it to you is good (for the comment count, at least.) If you're coming from sites where there are like/reblog/bookmark sorts of options, it's important to note that on Dreamwidth, the simplest possible interaction with someone else's post is still considerably more effort than that, and you will get a whole lot less comments than likes, universally : but a lot of people find this style is worth it anyway, including me.
The second thing is that when you make a post with the specific goal of generating lots of discussion, you are essentially inviting people to a gathering in your space. This was a metaphor that came up a lot in the good old days of the "is metafandom killing fandom?" discourse, and tbh it wasn't super useful for that, but if my specific goal is to host a discussion, I find it very useful to think of myself as a host. And as a host, I have duties - I have to make the space welcoming; I have to make sure people know that they're invited; I have to give people a reason to want to come; I have to remember that I'm in a position of responsibility for the guests who are in my space; I have to be ready to unobtrusively deal with messes; etc.
This is, again, different from something like a tumblr reblog chain where things move around between blogs and it's easy for everything to feel a little bit impersonal; on a DW post, everybody is coming to your personal space that you control and everybody's very aware of that. This is even more a factor in Dreamwidth than back in the LJ days, because Dreamwidth is still small enough that it feels even more personal; everybody who shows up is probably at least a friend of a friend, not a comfortably faceless stranger.
And hosting is work. Hosting is voluntarily taking on that extra responsibility to keep your guests comfortable and entertained. I, obviously, find it rewarding or I wouldn't have spent fifteen years trying to get better at it (unlike hosting RL events, which I just find exhausting and anxiety-inducing.) I find a dreamwidth post with thirty good comments from people I respect about equally satisfying with that one tumblr shitpost I made that has over 100000 reblogs; but ymmv. You might decide you love it like I do and try to host a few a month; you may hate it and flee DW for Mastodon; you may only want to do one once in a while when you feel like you have something very important to say or you really need the distraction of having people talk to you. It's all good.
So, hopefully I haven't scared you away!
Here's some specific concrete things I try do to in any individual post that I'm hoping will get good discussion going:
1. Only one topic per post.
It's tempting to make posts that cover a bunch of different things that are happening in your life, but it makes it awkward to comment. Very few people will be equally interested in all the things you mentioned, and even the ones who are, won't necessarily want to go to the effort of talking about all of them at once. But it can feel weird and offputting to leave a comment that only engages with one of the things you said in the post and ignores the rest of them.
It's also likely, especially as a compilation post gets longer, that people will start to skim-read and are likely to miss the thing you are talking about that they would have commented on if they'd actually noticed it.
That doesn't mean every post has to have a laser focus - "all the books I've read lately" or "five interesting facts I learned" or something like that is usually focused enough to catch the right attention, and as long as the post feels like it has a coherent connecting thread people will feel okay picking up part of the thread without feeling like they're ignoring everything else. It doesn't even have to be that coherent as long as you put in some kind of framing that makes it feel like it's all on a theme.
That's not to say you have to make every post about only one thing, but if there's something you'd particularly like to have a good discussion about, you should save it for its own post. And it's okay for DW posts to be short and sweet and simple! Mine usually aren't because that's just not how I write these days, but you won't be run off DW for making a bunch of short one-topic posts in a row.
2. Everybody likes to be asked.
End your post by directly asking your readers to talk to you, and make that final question something that most of them will find it very easy to comment on.
"People like to be asked" is a piece of old political advice that has never served me wrong in life, and it applies here just the same. The difference in number of comments between a long, well written-essay and the identical essay that has "So what do you think about X?" as the last line is significant. Even if people know that in theory you always want discussion, being explicitly asked really truly makes a difference in whether they do or not.
But not just any question will work. If you ask a question that most people can't answer, or that will take a lot of work to answer, then they'll wander away, and it'll actually reduce your comment count. "Does anyone have any good citations for academic papers about fungal disease in prehistoric lycopodia?" as your final discussion starter is unlikely to produce a lot of participation. So, what do you want to ask?
-You are not asking this question because it's a specific thing you need an answer to; you're asking because you want to know what your friends have to say about the broader idea. Pick a question based on what you think will get engagement, not what you want answered; the discussion will drift in other directions once it hits its stride anyway.
-It needs to be specific enough that your commenters don't have to put any thought in figuring out what to talk about. "What did you think of that movie" is harder because the commenter's having to do all the work of deciding what, specifically, to talk about; "what did you think of this outfit the main character wore" is easier because once you see the outfit you know exactly what your answer is.
-It can't be too specific, or people will feel like they don't have anything to say about it. "What did you think of this outfit the character wore" is good, "What do you think about this outfit in the context of the sociopolitical influences on early-20th-century French couture houses" may be what you are interested in, but not many other people are going to feel like they have enough expertise to say anything useful on that one, and "does anybody know the exact pattern # they used as a model for that costume" is definitely too specific for a discussion starter.
-It can't feel too risky. This'll depend on your specific audience, but if people feel like answering honestly is going to get their heads bit off, they'll stay away. "Do you think it was a bad idea to directly reference Nazism in that costume" is an excellent question to explore, but a little scary as a discussion starter to expect people to jump right in on.
Also, Polls are great. They ask a direct question that's easy to answer, they lower the interaction threshhold to almost less than even a like, and the multiple-choice answers will always be inadequate and thus drive people who would otherwise leave it alone to comment to point out exactly why they are inadequate. If you want to host discussions on the regular, it's worth a paid account just to be able to post polls.
3. Make your post broadly accessible, and require minimum context to contribute.
Here's the thing. It feels really nice to be able to post a dumb, obscure fandom in-joke and have fifty other fans join in, but that's just not how DW works these days. There aren't enough active people around to get the minimum people for that to work, and tbh I don't see us getting back to that any time soon. You have to assume and accept that most of the people reading your post don't share your current obsession, and often don't have any context for what you're talking about other than what's in the post itself.
This is obviously going to depend on your particular audience - like, I assume that people reading my DW are aware of media/genre fandom in general, are at least vaguely aware of the history of online transformative fandom over the past ten years (and the jargon that comes with it), and are aware of and broadly speaking supportive of current social justice thinking, including in particular disability, gender/sexuality, and US/British non-reality-averse politics.
Nearly anything else, I assume I have to provide my own context for if I want to get a large discussion going. Even if it's something I post about on the regular; people read a lot of social media, they won't necessarily remember that I posted about it in detail last week. I posted about sedoretu yesterday in a way that assumed that anyone reading it already knew about sedoretu AU and knew at least what Icelandic Sagas are, and figured I would get maybe five or six comments, at least one of which was from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ellen_fremedon and one of which was from lannamichaels, and that was about right. If I'd covered the same ground but written it for people who didn't understand or care about sedoretu or icelandic history, it would have been a lot harder to write but probably gotten four or five times the comments.
And providing helpful links or using specific terms that people can easily google doesn't work. People, in the aggregate, don't follow links and don't use Google. They just don't. Sorry. If people need to know something in order to understand what you're talking about, you need to write it into the post, and you also need to structure your post to make it clear that people don't need any other special knowledge in order to contribute to the discussion.
Also, most of the people reading my journal don't actually care about the Sagas of the Icelanders. Writing a post that assumes other people care about some niche interest is not going to get lots of comments. No, not even if you fill your post with enthusiasm and explanations about why it's so great; at most the response you'll get to that is a few "oh, that sounds great, I should look it up," which does not lead to record-breaking comment threads.
But! People do care about you. They will give you a certain amount of leeway because they care that you care. And they do care about their own current obsessions. And that's key: not only can you bring in factual context, you can bring in emotional context. People won't have the same feelings as you do about what you're posting, but you can unpack your own feelings - explain exactly why you care about this - and also invite them to relate it to their own similar feelings about similar things. And then you can start discussion about how great it is to feel passionate about things. And then suck them into your niche obsession sideways. :D
This is where the ending discussion starter can be very useful: I could write 1,000 words about the plot of an obscure '70s YA book I just read and get a couple of comments from people who like me as a person, because nobody knows or cares about that book. I can write 1,000 words about that same book, but focus on my relationship with it, use that to invite people to talk about obscure books they read in their own childhoods and still care about the same way, and suddenly everyone wants to join in, because the specific book isn't something anyone but me has context for, but the emotional context I have for it is something everyone feels like they can relate to, and then we can get a discussion going. Or I can post about my current obscure fandom that nobody but me cares about and then end with "and how does this compare to X in your current obscure fandom?" and that's enough to switch it from a no-comments post to a collapsed-comments post.
You also just want to make the post as accessible - disibility, content, layout, language whatever - as broadly as possible.
4. Use cut tags wisely.
First off, you don't always need to cut.
I need to cut because I am write very long posts, and it's polite not to wall-of-text people. But if a post's shorter than five or six average-sized paragraphs, you can probably get away with not cutting. And you can make a very good discussion starter post that's one line long if you pick the right line.
If you do cut, you need to put the cut in the right place. Clicking on a cut is effort on the part of the reader; you need to have enough text outside the cut to motivate them to click on it. I usually try to have an intro that's enough to give people a pretty good idea of what's under it, and then most of the blather under a cut, and then the discussion starter ending outside it too, because that'll make people go "ooh, I want to answer this question, so I guess I'd better read the whole post." You can also use custom cut text as a specific teaser for what's under the cut.
Also, never imply you're putting the cut in because what's under the cut isn't worth reading. People will believe you.
Also also, remember that while people who see the post on a reading page will see the cuts, if they follow a link they won't, so the post needs to make sense even if you can't see the cuts.
5. Answer your comments promptly
I am not great at this! And it takes time, so I try to make sure I don't make a discussion post unless I know I'll have time to hover over the comments.
Promptly doesn't mean immediately - I feel okay if I manage twelve hours, these days - but you want to answer at least the first few ASAP, because comments breed comments. If people click on your post and see discussion already happening, and in particular they see evidence that you the OP are reading and engaging with the commenters, they are much more likely to feel like it's worth leaving their own comment.
Also, you don't have to reply to every single comment - people going on their own tangent threads that you aren't even part of is GREAT, and you don't have to always get the last word - but make an effort to reply to every single commenter at least once. Nothing feels as cold and unwelcoming as when the host has spoken to everybody except you.
6. Be ready and able to deal with bad comments.
In theory there are no bad comments, just like there are no bad questions, because even the worst ones encourage other people to speak up in their turn.
In practice you will get a fair sprinkling of bad comments, including:
--comments that make it clear they lack reading comprehension, up to and including saying the specific thing you asked people not to say
--comments that are so wrong they aren't even something you can engage with
--comments where you can't actually figure out what they were trying to say, if anything
--comments that are super annoying in tone or content
--comments where people are being mean to each other because they got emotional
--worst case scenario - although fingers crossed, this is a lot less prevalent on DW than other platforms - bullying and concern trolls.
If you get bullying or trolling or stalking or other comments that are clearly left in bad faith, or people who keep being unwontedly mean to other commenters after it's been pointed out to them that they should step away and cool it, you need to be ready to delete, screen, block, report as justified. I have very, very rarely had to deal with this, and not really at all in the last five years, but if it happens, you need to know what to do, because it's your space and you're responsible for keeping everyone else feeling safe and welcome to your own standards. It helps to work out for yourself in advance what your exact line is here, and if it's different on discussion posts vs. other kinds of posts.
For all the other kinds of bad comments - all the bad comments that are being left in good faith by people who just want to engage with you - you have to be willing to reply cheerfully, politely, and in good faith in return. No matter how annoying they are. No matter how cranky they made you. No matter how PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED you would be in pointing out that they made a bad comment. Because every other person who clicks on your post will see your reply, and you want them to think "Oh, my comment will be valued here!" not "oh dear, if I don't make exactly the right comment, the host will hate me forever." And most of the people who'd be scared away would probably have left perfectly lovely comments.
You can certainly try to gently and politely nudge the bad commenters into understanding why their comment was not a good comment, but you need to focus on keeping them feeling welcome while you do it, because making all commenters, even the ones who leave bad comments, feel welcome, is your main job, right after making sure people are safe. And you need to be willing to assume, in the absence of other evidence, that any given person is commenting in good faith.
If you don't think you can do that for a particular topic, maybe that's a topic you should post about with a locked group of people you know really well, not post a public discussion post on. Because all it really takes is a few times when people get the impression that they'll get snapped at if they comment on your posts, and it chills everything. It's not easy! Being a good host is work.
7. Timing
I have found on DW, at least in my group, that early weekday mornings are the best times to post something that will get lots of comments. Weekend evenings are the worst. I assume I must not be the only person who uses DW to waste time at work while looking like I'm busily writing important work-related things, so I want to get the post at the top of people's thoughts as they get online in the morning. Often with a post timed that way, there will be a few comments in the morning, and then more in the afternoon/evening as people get home and catch up - but I will still get more evening comments on a morning post than an evening. Presumably people read their feeds in the morning, and then come back later to comment after thinking about it all day.
This is just what I've observed for DW; it might be different elsewhere (it's Sunday mornings on AO3); but pay attention and see what works for you.
Beyond what you do in an individual post, the single most important factor in getting lots of comments is that you've collected a readership who feel comfortable commenting on your discussions, and that happens over time, as part of things you do in a ongoing basis.
I have basically set up my DW presence around wanting to host discussions, and think of it more like an old-fashioned blog that's about publishing articles to the 'net in general, because comment notifications feed a hungry part of my soul. You don't have to do that. There are other ways to journal. I sometimes regret that I am not the sort of person who can post detailed daily life entries that get almost no comments every single day, or use my journal as a raw emotional outlet (because I find the journals I read that do that universally fascinating and valuable - but still rarely feel comfortable commenting on them.)
Also, you can probably use some of this advice to get more comments on those kinds of posts too, I just haven't the experience to speak to that very well.
If you want a journal that isn't mostly aimed at discussion-y posts, but still host discussions sometimes, it can help to a) use locked posts creatively; b) clearly mark posts that you intend to be discussion posts with you as host, as distinct from personal posts where you are just being you in your space; c) use communities - even if all you do is make the discussion post in a community and then link to it on your personal journal, the fact that it's in a community can make it feel more outward facing and welcoming for casual commenters. If you're lucky enough, you can join in an active community where other people have already done some of the work of building a welcoming climate and a talkative readership, although in DW as it's been lately, active communities are sometimes tough going.
But here's some specific things that are important:
8.) Make friends. Talk to people.
People are way more likely to comment if they've interacted with you before. First, it gives them some idea of how the interaction will go; second, it makes them feel like you value their voice specifically.
And I can't tell you how many times I've noticed that someone silently subscribed to me awhile ago, subscribed to them back because they have interesting posts, commented on a couple of their interesting posts as they went by, and as suddenly as that they've gone from lurker to one of my steadiest commenters. It's the same way in reverse with me - I add someone who is really cool and clearly not interested in me, but then they leave a couple comments on my journal and suddenly I get the courage to start commenting on theirs too. It really does matter if you make the effort to the be the first one to reach out.
In terms of finding people to reach out to, the absolute best way I know is to find someone you like who has a DW journal (even if they aren't active on DW), and then go to their reading page, and read it, and add anyone on that reading page whose posts look like something you want to read. And then comment on a couple of their posts. That will net you currently-active people who you have at least a little bit of a community connection with already.
If you have a paid account, you can use your network page as a shortcut for this. (If your network page is flooded with feeds/communities right now, you can add ?show=p to the end of the URL to make it show only personal journals.)
I have never had much luck using interests or things like that to meet people (and a lot of people have super outdated interests anyway; I haven't fully overhauled mine since I came to DW), friending memes and comms only net you the sort of people who take part in friending memes (which isn't bad! But it'll be mostly people in the same place you are, i.e., actively searching for more friends, so it's not always the best way to connect with established circles of active people), and DW is slow enough, and full enough of fandom butterflies, that choosing your friends based on their current interests usually isn't a great strategy anyway. If you're coming from a different style of site where you're used to only adding people who ship not only your pairing but a particular version of your pairing, it can be a big change to mostly interacting with people who are just sort of fans of fandom in the same way you are. But most of us here love hanging with our sort of people that way.
9. Be consistent.
The more reliable you give the impression you are, the safer people will feel commenting. You don't have to be reliably reliable - I get a lot of mileage out of reliably flaky sometimes - but people need to feel like they know what to expect when you're hosting, and that needs to be what they get.
Also, people don't deal with tone whiplash very well. This can suck, because sometimes life has tone whiplash, and sometimes what you need after something horrible is a good, silly fannish discussion post, and sometimes life is just so long-term crappy that mixing in non-depressing content always feels like a tone shift regardless. But it makes commenters uncomfortable if you're switching emotional registers too often, and they don't know how to relax. If you do that, clearly delineate some borders - 'so awful thing was a thing that definitely happened, but I just want to talk about something cheerful now' or something like that, so people know we're definitely doing cheerful now. (There will be people who ignore that and comment on awful thing in cheerful post - see point 6 above - but the point is not to stop that from happening, the point is to let the good commenters know what they should do.) And stick with the same emotional register in the same post and all of its comments.
Also, put out a consistent stream of unlocked content. I have been trying - and mostly succeeding - to post an average of once a week pretty much since I came to DW, and that's a pretty good posting rate for me. (posting daily is going to knock me out this month if I actually make it through.) Some people post daily, and that works pretty well for them. Every three months, probably too little, people won't really know you well enough to be comfortable in your space. Fifteen times a day is fine, but in that case you want to definitely mark off when you're doing a more substantial discussion type of post.
11. Be persistent
Look, it took me more than ten years to get from an LJ that only my RL friends andmonksandbones were reading to being able to collapse comments threads whenever I get bored. You should be able to do it faster than that - I was a horrible lurker for a very long time, and also it's actually in some ways easier to build audience now on Dreamwidth because it's harder to get lost in the crowd. But it does take time; it takes getting a feel for what kinds of discussion posts work for you, it takes time to make friends and learn what kinds of things work for them, it takes time to get trust built up that commenting on your posts always ends well. But if you like this style of social media it's worth it!
And if you want an example - when I was doing my FMK poll posts, before I got way too behind on the reading portion, I was pretty much just going down every item in this list in an incredibly blatant way.
1. Every post was about a set of books, usually on a specific theme
2. There was a poll in every post, and the post was a specific question.
3. The lists were long enough, and had enough well-known things on them, that most people saw at least one author, title, or genre that had some familiarity with - I chose my sets that way on purpose - and I also specifically stated that you didn't have to know the books well to participate. Also, I knew that DW in general had a lot of readers interested in the same genres I was, so I had a head start. And I gave the short explanation of what was going in every post, knowing most people wouldn't follow a link or read the long version if I reposted it.
4. I put the long polls behind a cut tag, but I listed every author in the poll in the cut tag, to tempt people with specific reasons to click.
5. I did my best to answer all top-level comments quickly.
6. Luckily I didn't get many bad comments; but I was also posting on a topic I had very few personal feelings about, so I felt ready to deal with them if I had to.
7. I posted on Tuesday mornings(-ish)
8. I already had a pretty good number of followers, and I made a special effort to keep up with following back regular FMK commenters.
9. I was extremely consistent! At least until I got way behind and started skipping weeks. Also, FMK was keeping me busy enough that I rarely posted about other things in that period.
10. The longer I kept it going, the more comments I got on every post.
And those posts always got a lot of very good discussion on them.
Meanwhile, the follow-up review posts often ignored almost all of these and got very little engagement, even though they were to the same audience, and theoretically about exactly the same thing.
Also, I remember the last time december meme happened, my reading page suddenly got so busy I could barely keep up, but now we've got that and tumblr returnees at the same time, and I am actually behind on my DW reading page! This hasn't happened in probably half a decade! It's great, but also AUGH, I am behind on my DW reading page and I've also got so much stuff to do.
So, this is basically fifteen years' of trial-and-error learning on how to make dreamwidth posts that will produce good comment discussions involving lots of people. After fifteen years, I am at the point where if I'm sitting at home feeling depressed and in need of human conversation, I can make a DW post and have enough comment notifications to keep me in ego boost for several days. And a lot of what makes this work is just fairly simple strategies that I wish more people knew.
There's two basic principles to bear in mind going in. The first is that leaving a comment requires both effort and risk on the part of the person commenting, and your goal is to lower that threshhold of both risk and effort as far as possible. Anything that makes it easier, or makes it feel safer, for someone to take part in the discussion is good. Anything that takes work, risk, or cognitive load away from them and shifts it to you is good (for the comment count, at least.) If you're coming from sites where there are like/reblog/bookmark sorts of options, it's important to note that on Dreamwidth, the simplest possible interaction with someone else's post is still considerably more effort than that, and you will get a whole lot less comments than likes, universally : but a lot of people find this style is worth it anyway, including me.
The second thing is that when you make a post with the specific goal of generating lots of discussion, you are essentially inviting people to a gathering in your space. This was a metaphor that came up a lot in the good old days of the "is metafandom killing fandom?" discourse, and tbh it wasn't super useful for that, but if my specific goal is to host a discussion, I find it very useful to think of myself as a host. And as a host, I have duties - I have to make the space welcoming; I have to make sure people know that they're invited; I have to give people a reason to want to come; I have to remember that I'm in a position of responsibility for the guests who are in my space; I have to be ready to unobtrusively deal with messes; etc.
This is, again, different from something like a tumblr reblog chain where things move around between blogs and it's easy for everything to feel a little bit impersonal; on a DW post, everybody is coming to your personal space that you control and everybody's very aware of that. This is even more a factor in Dreamwidth than back in the LJ days, because Dreamwidth is still small enough that it feels even more personal; everybody who shows up is probably at least a friend of a friend, not a comfortably faceless stranger.
And hosting is work. Hosting is voluntarily taking on that extra responsibility to keep your guests comfortable and entertained. I, obviously, find it rewarding or I wouldn't have spent fifteen years trying to get better at it (unlike hosting RL events, which I just find exhausting and anxiety-inducing.) I find a dreamwidth post with thirty good comments from people I respect about equally satisfying with that one tumblr shitpost I made that has over 100000 reblogs; but ymmv. You might decide you love it like I do and try to host a few a month; you may hate it and flee DW for Mastodon; you may only want to do one once in a while when you feel like you have something very important to say or you really need the distraction of having people talk to you. It's all good.
So, hopefully I haven't scared you away!
Here's some specific concrete things I try do to in any individual post that I'm hoping will get good discussion going:
1. Only one topic per post.
It's tempting to make posts that cover a bunch of different things that are happening in your life, but it makes it awkward to comment. Very few people will be equally interested in all the things you mentioned, and even the ones who are, won't necessarily want to go to the effort of talking about all of them at once. But it can feel weird and offputting to leave a comment that only engages with one of the things you said in the post and ignores the rest of them.
It's also likely, especially as a compilation post gets longer, that people will start to skim-read and are likely to miss the thing you are talking about that they would have commented on if they'd actually noticed it.
That doesn't mean every post has to have a laser focus - "all the books I've read lately" or "five interesting facts I learned" or something like that is usually focused enough to catch the right attention, and as long as the post feels like it has a coherent connecting thread people will feel okay picking up part of the thread without feeling like they're ignoring everything else. It doesn't even have to be that coherent as long as you put in some kind of framing that makes it feel like it's all on a theme.
That's not to say you have to make every post about only one thing, but if there's something you'd particularly like to have a good discussion about, you should save it for its own post. And it's okay for DW posts to be short and sweet and simple! Mine usually aren't because that's just not how I write these days, but you won't be run off DW for making a bunch of short one-topic posts in a row.
2. Everybody likes to be asked.
End your post by directly asking your readers to talk to you, and make that final question something that most of them will find it very easy to comment on.
"People like to be asked" is a piece of old political advice that has never served me wrong in life, and it applies here just the same. The difference in number of comments between a long, well written-essay and the identical essay that has "So what do you think about X?" as the last line is significant. Even if people know that in theory you always want discussion, being explicitly asked really truly makes a difference in whether they do or not.
But not just any question will work. If you ask a question that most people can't answer, or that will take a lot of work to answer, then they'll wander away, and it'll actually reduce your comment count. "Does anyone have any good citations for academic papers about fungal disease in prehistoric lycopodia?" as your final discussion starter is unlikely to produce a lot of participation. So, what do you want to ask?
-You are not asking this question because it's a specific thing you need an answer to; you're asking because you want to know what your friends have to say about the broader idea. Pick a question based on what you think will get engagement, not what you want answered; the discussion will drift in other directions once it hits its stride anyway.
-It needs to be specific enough that your commenters don't have to put any thought in figuring out what to talk about. "What did you think of that movie" is harder because the commenter's having to do all the work of deciding what, specifically, to talk about; "what did you think of this outfit the main character wore" is easier because once you see the outfit you know exactly what your answer is.
-It can't be too specific, or people will feel like they don't have anything to say about it. "What did you think of this outfit the character wore" is good, "What do you think about this outfit in the context of the sociopolitical influences on early-20th-century French couture houses" may be what you are interested in, but not many other people are going to feel like they have enough expertise to say anything useful on that one, and "does anybody know the exact pattern # they used as a model for that costume" is definitely too specific for a discussion starter.
-It can't feel too risky. This'll depend on your specific audience, but if people feel like answering honestly is going to get their heads bit off, they'll stay away. "Do you think it was a bad idea to directly reference Nazism in that costume" is an excellent question to explore, but a little scary as a discussion starter to expect people to jump right in on.
Also, Polls are great. They ask a direct question that's easy to answer, they lower the interaction threshhold to almost less than even a like, and the multiple-choice answers will always be inadequate and thus drive people who would otherwise leave it alone to comment to point out exactly why they are inadequate. If you want to host discussions on the regular, it's worth a paid account just to be able to post polls.
3. Make your post broadly accessible, and require minimum context to contribute.
Here's the thing. It feels really nice to be able to post a dumb, obscure fandom in-joke and have fifty other fans join in, but that's just not how DW works these days. There aren't enough active people around to get the minimum people for that to work, and tbh I don't see us getting back to that any time soon. You have to assume and accept that most of the people reading your post don't share your current obsession, and often don't have any context for what you're talking about other than what's in the post itself.
This is obviously going to depend on your particular audience - like, I assume that people reading my DW are aware of media/genre fandom in general, are at least vaguely aware of the history of online transformative fandom over the past ten years (and the jargon that comes with it), and are aware of and broadly speaking supportive of current social justice thinking, including in particular disability, gender/sexuality, and US/British non-reality-averse politics.
Nearly anything else, I assume I have to provide my own context for if I want to get a large discussion going. Even if it's something I post about on the regular; people read a lot of social media, they won't necessarily remember that I posted about it in detail last week. I posted about sedoretu yesterday in a way that assumed that anyone reading it already knew about sedoretu AU and knew at least what Icelandic Sagas are, and figured I would get maybe five or six comments, at least one of which was from
ellen_fremedon and one of which was from lannamichaels, and that was about right. If I'd covered the same ground but written it for people who didn't understand or care about sedoretu or icelandic history, it would have been a lot harder to write but probably gotten four or five times the comments.And providing helpful links or using specific terms that people can easily google doesn't work. People, in the aggregate, don't follow links and don't use Google. They just don't. Sorry. If people need to know something in order to understand what you're talking about, you need to write it into the post, and you also need to structure your post to make it clear that people don't need any other special knowledge in order to contribute to the discussion.
Also, most of the people reading my journal don't actually care about the Sagas of the Icelanders. Writing a post that assumes other people care about some niche interest is not going to get lots of comments. No, not even if you fill your post with enthusiasm and explanations about why it's so great; at most the response you'll get to that is a few "oh, that sounds great, I should look it up," which does not lead to record-breaking comment threads.
But! People do care about you. They will give you a certain amount of leeway because they care that you care. And they do care about their own current obsessions. And that's key: not only can you bring in factual context, you can bring in emotional context. People won't have the same feelings as you do about what you're posting, but you can unpack your own feelings - explain exactly why you care about this - and also invite them to relate it to their own similar feelings about similar things. And then you can start discussion about how great it is to feel passionate about things. And then suck them into your niche obsession sideways. :D
This is where the ending discussion starter can be very useful: I could write 1,000 words about the plot of an obscure '70s YA book I just read and get a couple of comments from people who like me as a person, because nobody knows or cares about that book. I can write 1,000 words about that same book, but focus on my relationship with it, use that to invite people to talk about obscure books they read in their own childhoods and still care about the same way, and suddenly everyone wants to join in, because the specific book isn't something anyone but me has context for, but the emotional context I have for it is something everyone feels like they can relate to, and then we can get a discussion going. Or I can post about my current obscure fandom that nobody but me cares about and then end with "and how does this compare to X in your current obscure fandom?" and that's enough to switch it from a no-comments post to a collapsed-comments post.
You also just want to make the post as accessible - disibility, content, layout, language whatever - as broadly as possible.
4. Use cut tags wisely.
First off, you don't always need to cut.
I need to cut because I am write very long posts, and it's polite not to wall-of-text people. But if a post's shorter than five or six average-sized paragraphs, you can probably get away with not cutting. And you can make a very good discussion starter post that's one line long if you pick the right line.
If you do cut, you need to put the cut in the right place. Clicking on a cut is effort on the part of the reader; you need to have enough text outside the cut to motivate them to click on it. I usually try to have an intro that's enough to give people a pretty good idea of what's under it, and then most of the blather under a cut, and then the discussion starter ending outside it too, because that'll make people go "ooh, I want to answer this question, so I guess I'd better read the whole post." You can also use custom cut text as a specific teaser for what's under the cut.
Also, never imply you're putting the cut in because what's under the cut isn't worth reading. People will believe you.
Also also, remember that while people who see the post on a reading page will see the cuts, if they follow a link they won't, so the post needs to make sense even if you can't see the cuts.
5. Answer your comments promptly
I am not great at this! And it takes time, so I try to make sure I don't make a discussion post unless I know I'll have time to hover over the comments.
Promptly doesn't mean immediately - I feel okay if I manage twelve hours, these days - but you want to answer at least the first few ASAP, because comments breed comments. If people click on your post and see discussion already happening, and in particular they see evidence that you the OP are reading and engaging with the commenters, they are much more likely to feel like it's worth leaving their own comment.
Also, you don't have to reply to every single comment - people going on their own tangent threads that you aren't even part of is GREAT, and you don't have to always get the last word - but make an effort to reply to every single commenter at least once. Nothing feels as cold and unwelcoming as when the host has spoken to everybody except you.
6. Be ready and able to deal with bad comments.
In theory there are no bad comments, just like there are no bad questions, because even the worst ones encourage other people to speak up in their turn.
In practice you will get a fair sprinkling of bad comments, including:
--comments that make it clear they lack reading comprehension, up to and including saying the specific thing you asked people not to say
--comments that are so wrong they aren't even something you can engage with
--comments where you can't actually figure out what they were trying to say, if anything
--comments that are super annoying in tone or content
--comments where people are being mean to each other because they got emotional
--worst case scenario - although fingers crossed, this is a lot less prevalent on DW than other platforms - bullying and concern trolls.
If you get bullying or trolling or stalking or other comments that are clearly left in bad faith, or people who keep being unwontedly mean to other commenters after it's been pointed out to them that they should step away and cool it, you need to be ready to delete, screen, block, report as justified. I have very, very rarely had to deal with this, and not really at all in the last five years, but if it happens, you need to know what to do, because it's your space and you're responsible for keeping everyone else feeling safe and welcome to your own standards. It helps to work out for yourself in advance what your exact line is here, and if it's different on discussion posts vs. other kinds of posts.
For all the other kinds of bad comments - all the bad comments that are being left in good faith by people who just want to engage with you - you have to be willing to reply cheerfully, politely, and in good faith in return. No matter how annoying they are. No matter how cranky they made you. No matter how PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED you would be in pointing out that they made a bad comment. Because every other person who clicks on your post will see your reply, and you want them to think "Oh, my comment will be valued here!" not "oh dear, if I don't make exactly the right comment, the host will hate me forever." And most of the people who'd be scared away would probably have left perfectly lovely comments.
You can certainly try to gently and politely nudge the bad commenters into understanding why their comment was not a good comment, but you need to focus on keeping them feeling welcome while you do it, because making all commenters, even the ones who leave bad comments, feel welcome, is your main job, right after making sure people are safe. And you need to be willing to assume, in the absence of other evidence, that any given person is commenting in good faith.
If you don't think you can do that for a particular topic, maybe that's a topic you should post about with a locked group of people you know really well, not post a public discussion post on. Because all it really takes is a few times when people get the impression that they'll get snapped at if they comment on your posts, and it chills everything. It's not easy! Being a good host is work.
7. Timing
I have found on DW, at least in my group, that early weekday mornings are the best times to post something that will get lots of comments. Weekend evenings are the worst. I assume I must not be the only person who uses DW to waste time at work while looking like I'm busily writing important work-related things, so I want to get the post at the top of people's thoughts as they get online in the morning. Often with a post timed that way, there will be a few comments in the morning, and then more in the afternoon/evening as people get home and catch up - but I will still get more evening comments on a morning post than an evening. Presumably people read their feeds in the morning, and then come back later to comment after thinking about it all day.
This is just what I've observed for DW; it might be different elsewhere (it's Sunday mornings on AO3); but pay attention and see what works for you.
Beyond what you do in an individual post, the single most important factor in getting lots of comments is that you've collected a readership who feel comfortable commenting on your discussions, and that happens over time, as part of things you do in a ongoing basis.
I have basically set up my DW presence around wanting to host discussions, and think of it more like an old-fashioned blog that's about publishing articles to the 'net in general, because comment notifications feed a hungry part of my soul. You don't have to do that. There are other ways to journal. I sometimes regret that I am not the sort of person who can post detailed daily life entries that get almost no comments every single day, or use my journal as a raw emotional outlet (because I find the journals I read that do that universally fascinating and valuable - but still rarely feel comfortable commenting on them.)
Also, you can probably use some of this advice to get more comments on those kinds of posts too, I just haven't the experience to speak to that very well.
If you want a journal that isn't mostly aimed at discussion-y posts, but still host discussions sometimes, it can help to a) use locked posts creatively; b) clearly mark posts that you intend to be discussion posts with you as host, as distinct from personal posts where you are just being you in your space; c) use communities - even if all you do is make the discussion post in a community and then link to it on your personal journal, the fact that it's in a community can make it feel more outward facing and welcoming for casual commenters. If you're lucky enough, you can join in an active community where other people have already done some of the work of building a welcoming climate and a talkative readership, although in DW as it's been lately, active communities are sometimes tough going.
But here's some specific things that are important:
8.) Make friends. Talk to people.
People are way more likely to comment if they've interacted with you before. First, it gives them some idea of how the interaction will go; second, it makes them feel like you value their voice specifically.
And I can't tell you how many times I've noticed that someone silently subscribed to me awhile ago, subscribed to them back because they have interesting posts, commented on a couple of their interesting posts as they went by, and as suddenly as that they've gone from lurker to one of my steadiest commenters. It's the same way in reverse with me - I add someone who is really cool and clearly not interested in me, but then they leave a couple comments on my journal and suddenly I get the courage to start commenting on theirs too. It really does matter if you make the effort to the be the first one to reach out.
In terms of finding people to reach out to, the absolute best way I know is to find someone you like who has a DW journal (even if they aren't active on DW), and then go to their reading page, and read it, and add anyone on that reading page whose posts look like something you want to read. And then comment on a couple of their posts. That will net you currently-active people who you have at least a little bit of a community connection with already.
If you have a paid account, you can use your network page as a shortcut for this. (If your network page is flooded with feeds/communities right now, you can add ?show=p to the end of the URL to make it show only personal journals.)
I have never had much luck using interests or things like that to meet people (and a lot of people have super outdated interests anyway; I haven't fully overhauled mine since I came to DW), friending memes and comms only net you the sort of people who take part in friending memes (which isn't bad! But it'll be mostly people in the same place you are, i.e., actively searching for more friends, so it's not always the best way to connect with established circles of active people), and DW is slow enough, and full enough of fandom butterflies, that choosing your friends based on their current interests usually isn't a great strategy anyway. If you're coming from a different style of site where you're used to only adding people who ship not only your pairing but a particular version of your pairing, it can be a big change to mostly interacting with people who are just sort of fans of fandom in the same way you are. But most of us here love hanging with our sort of people that way.
9. Be consistent.
The more reliable you give the impression you are, the safer people will feel commenting. You don't have to be reliably reliable - I get a lot of mileage out of reliably flaky sometimes - but people need to feel like they know what to expect when you're hosting, and that needs to be what they get.
Also, people don't deal with tone whiplash very well. This can suck, because sometimes life has tone whiplash, and sometimes what you need after something horrible is a good, silly fannish discussion post, and sometimes life is just so long-term crappy that mixing in non-depressing content always feels like a tone shift regardless. But it makes commenters uncomfortable if you're switching emotional registers too often, and they don't know how to relax. If you do that, clearly delineate some borders - 'so awful thing was a thing that definitely happened, but I just want to talk about something cheerful now' or something like that, so people know we're definitely doing cheerful now. (There will be people who ignore that and comment on awful thing in cheerful post - see point 6 above - but the point is not to stop that from happening, the point is to let the good commenters know what they should do.) And stick with the same emotional register in the same post and all of its comments.
Also, put out a consistent stream of unlocked content. I have been trying - and mostly succeeding - to post an average of once a week pretty much since I came to DW, and that's a pretty good posting rate for me. (posting daily is going to knock me out this month if I actually make it through.) Some people post daily, and that works pretty well for them. Every three months, probably too little, people won't really know you well enough to be comfortable in your space. Fifteen times a day is fine, but in that case you want to definitely mark off when you're doing a more substantial discussion type of post.
11. Be persistent
Look, it took me more than ten years to get from an LJ that only my RL friends and
monksandbones were reading to being able to collapse comments threads whenever I get bored. You should be able to do it faster than that - I was a horrible lurker for a very long time, and also it's actually in some ways easier to build audience now on Dreamwidth because it's harder to get lost in the crowd. But it does take time; it takes getting a feel for what kinds of discussion posts work for you, it takes time to make friends and learn what kinds of things work for them, it takes time to get trust built up that commenting on your posts always ends well. But if you like this style of social media it's worth it!And if you want an example - when I was doing my FMK poll posts, before I got way too behind on the reading portion, I was pretty much just going down every item in this list in an incredibly blatant way.
1. Every post was about a set of books, usually on a specific theme
2. There was a poll in every post, and the post was a specific question.
3. The lists were long enough, and had enough well-known things on them, that most people saw at least one author, title, or genre that had some familiarity with - I chose my sets that way on purpose - and I also specifically stated that you didn't have to know the books well to participate. Also, I knew that DW in general had a lot of readers interested in the same genres I was, so I had a head start. And I gave the short explanation of what was going in every post, knowing most people wouldn't follow a link or read the long version if I reposted it.
4. I put the long polls behind a cut tag, but I listed every author in the poll in the cut tag, to tempt people with specific reasons to click.
5. I did my best to answer all top-level comments quickly.
6. Luckily I didn't get many bad comments; but I was also posting on a topic I had very few personal feelings about, so I felt ready to deal with them if I had to.
7. I posted on Tuesday mornings(-ish)
8. I already had a pretty good number of followers, and I made a special effort to keep up with following back regular FMK commenters.
9. I was extremely consistent! At least until I got way behind and started skipping weeks. Also, FMK was keeping me busy enough that I rarely posted about other things in that period.
10. The longer I kept it going, the more comments I got on every post.
And those posts always got a lot of very good discussion on them.
Meanwhile, the follow-up review posts often ignored almost all of these and got very little engagement, even though they were to the same audience, and theoretically about exactly the same thing.
no subject
no subject
no subject