Please, let us abandon the place where, when discussing unrelated topics on the internet, a rummage in the analogy drawer results in “Ah, here we are, sluts.”
I’m sure one could explain at great length why it is perfectly appropriate and innocuous to bring sluts into discussions of journalistic virtue but there are already perfectly good subreddits for that sort of thing.
You know, we don’t really think about clickthrough rates at all. On the level of a site like BB, it’s not part of the reward system, which is all about aggregate, long-term trends. Most editors basically look at the gross total uniques and page views once in a while, and that’s our vague guide for how good we’re doing. I track things a little closer, as I keep track of freelancer contributions.
Antinous offered unfettered and welcome criticism of Boing Boing for years. He left because he didn’t like moderating the new comment system.
We’re not a comment-driven site! At least in the sense you mean (clickthroughs, traffic, etc.)
If your site isn’t about the comments, then adding comments will not grow the site.
The given wisdom around “comments driving contents” is basically an early-mid 2000s marketing fantasy about “captive growth” that was likely never really true to begin with. For example, adding comments to BB in 2007 reduced the amount of incoming referral traffic to the site. Best guess? Discussion of BB posts at other sites moved into BB itself. We like it here, for sure, but could always bump the stats by forcing y’all out onto twitter and facebook, where discussions like this would generate referral traffic to us from all your friends, instead of being read by, like, the 4 people still participating in this discussion.
