These places can be lively spaces for conversations and debates about anthropology, but we have to actively work to make that happen. One of the issues, as Alex mentions, is that much of the conversation/reaction takes place off site. I’m not sure why this is the case, but some of it may be to avoid comment moderation. Just a guess. Why post on here and wait for your comment to go through moderation when you can post on FB or Twitter with no wait, no mediation?

That said, the truth is, as Ryan says, that there are almost no comments on our blog now. All the discussion has moved to social media. I moderate about 10 comments a week, and on most weeks all of those go through without being bounced back. So it’s not the case that “there are no “viable” comments after the moderating process”. Rather, people are reading the blog in FaceBook and commenting on it on Twitter, to the extent that they engage at all. To be honest, I am not even sure that that many people read the posts all the way to the end — if they are anything like me, they read the headline, retweet the post, and then move on :S

I will take a stab at answering your questions. First of all, the number of comments we receive compared to the number of people who read (or click on) posts is pretty small. From what I understand this pattern is pretty common. In general a relatively small number of people actually comment on blogs and other online platforms. So, it’s not like we get a ton of comments in the first place. We get some, and every once in a while we have to hold a comment back for violating our policies, but that doesn’t happen too often these days. One other issue is that much of the actual discussion of our posts has shifted to other social media, including Twitter and Facebook. We can track some of this but not all of it. The other factor here is that people often read pieces, don’t comment, don’t share them via social media and perhaps talk about them or think about them in “real life” offline. This last part is really hard to track. All in all what this means is that comments are just the tip of the iceberg, and they don’t actually tell us very much about the actual effects, impacts, and impressions of a given piece.

All of that said, I think your suggestion–that we editors can help spark discussion–is a great idea. We have to tend to the proverbial garden to get the community to grow, and it would probably help if we did just that a bit more often. This is just my take though…I’d be interested to hear what the other SM editors/authors have to say.

Ryan