Guardian commenting community figures update
The Guardian state that commenting continues to grow on their site, despite the introduction of a controversial new format unpopular with some users.
A new blog post by Guardian readers’ editor Chris Elliott has appeared with some more numbers about the size of the community commenting on their website. He says:
The total number of comments in January was 683,492 (a 14% rise in comparison with November). The number of commenters increased by 11% on November, and reports of abuse were down by 23%.
In my piece about newspaper website comments for The MediaBriefing the other day I said I’d done some analysis on some prolific contributors to the site, including, it must be said, myself.
I identified twenty accounts which between them had made 6,184 comments in January, an average of about 300 each. With that total figure for January public, I can now see that those twenty people alone left 0.9% of the comments on the site during the month.
It should be noted that I have no way of comparing these figures to any other national news site, as no other paper is as open with publishing the data.
There are some other figures revealed in the comment thread under the blog post by Joanna Geary. She says that comparatively comments are up 37% increase on the same month last year. She gives the January 2012 comment total as 498,882, compared to 2013’s 683,492. She said the number of individual commenters was up by 31% compared to January 2012.
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by Martin Belam, February 18, 2013 
I’m a designer and journalist, and the founder of Emblem, a digital consultancy offering user experience design, information architecture and training services. I’ve spent over a decade building products for brands like the Guardian, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC, and now work with clients in the publishing, media, arts, heritage and culture sectors. To find out about working with us, please email.
Problem is that the comments thread makes clear January year-on-year is up 37% and the November year-on-year is up 35%, so quite clearly the nesting isn’t the *cause* of the rise in number of comments. It happened at the same time, but nesting didn’t cause it (or not to any degree that is statistically significant).
The drop of 23% in reporting is worrying. Either the conversation has got much more placid (unlikely) or the users who were diligent in reporting abuse can no longer be bothered trawling through.
The number of Moderators isn’t rising at the same rate as the number of comments, so there are fewer moderators doing more work, which given Mods send most comments to the queue, means that coverage is stretched.
Both these factors, and the clear and unambiguous view of the majority of regulars on all these threads indicates that quality of discussion has falled as it is harder for people to follow, and therefore the comments are less interactive.
Traffic up, comments up, interactivity between users leading to high quality conversations down.
I’m a huge fan of Chris Elliot, but the Guardian’s pigheadedness in insisting this transition has been positive when almost no-one outside the building agrees (and I don’t think its universally agreed inside King’s Place either), does not bode well for future changes.
It might be that the actual commenting community is so small it doesn’t matter, it might be that the advertisers’ money follows volume more than quality, it might be that curation by editors means the best comments are saved anyway – but the idea that nesting has been a success seems to me to be baseless.
Yes, I read the figures more in the sense of pointing out “look, commenting hasn’t fallen off a cliff” than as in proving “nesting has grown reach for us”
To be honest, personally I can take or leave nesting/threading. I don’t have it enabled here.
The nesting thing has made it utterly impossible to keep following a thread. I’m not going to wade through 6 pages of comments 3 or 4 times, just to find the new comments. If there were an easy way to see which comments were new since my last visit, I might, but not as their system currently stands. Not being a tech person, I’ve no idea how hard it would be to have comments that were new since a reader’s last visit, say, flagged with a little, brightly-coloured “new” flag or old comments in grey font (like blockquotes used to be) with new ones in black or something.
I find that what I do now is read a thread once and then only return to it via my own comments, if someone replies to me and I want to respond. That doesn’t happen much because I just don’t comment much at all these days. Knowing that I’m not going to have the same sort of interactions with other posters that I used to, I just don’t bother most of the time.
As for the abuse reports going down, I’m not so sure that’s entirely a bad thing, but I also think that it might be partly because there’s just so much vitriol on some threads, that it would be too time-consuming to report it all.