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This is not going to be a complaint about comments. Not even about the crazy Bosnian guy who posts up to nine nonsense comments per day and didn't get any published for weeks.
Instead, I'd like to explain my participation in the comments, in order to avoid or eliminate misunderstandings.
I don't see discussions in the comments as a process for convincing anyone. People very rarely convince each other after opinions were formed. I can see very well that many unsupported opinions are offered in the comments that are logically incompatible with reasoning or even links in my article. This is normal; people very, very rarely change opinions.
Very often my comments are a kind of addition or clarification to the article, or corrections of record regarding (in my opinion) wrong information by some other commenter.
I know someone who took my mention of disagreement as a critique of supposedly insufficient ideological purity. That's never what I mean. I understand opinions differ, backgrounds differ, preferences differ - I'm merely putting in the time to publish my opinions and sources of choice based on my background and my preferences.
Oh, and another thing; me not commenting doesn't mean agreement, but at the same time I often do not comment because I agree anyway. This leads to comments of mine being much above proportional dissenting or critical. I simply don't see much virtue in posting comments about agreement. What would those be for? They wouldn't add a perspective or info, and thus be free of content.So don't be offended if all replies you get from me are dissenting ones. That still doesn't mean that I disagree more often than I agree.
S O
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It's smart to outline the logic about the comments in a specific post, so that the clarification can be linked.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it might help to add a simple 'agree', but that will of course also create a certain expectation. Overall I do think that you spend a considerable amount of time responding and discussions tend to yield less the longer they go on. Maybe you could curtail some of that.
Personally I sometimes like to put up facts, stats and links without formulating a specific opinion just to add a perspective and avoid a personal 'stake' in the discussion.
In some cases those figures should speak for themselves like in the Italian one, but it's of course hard to resist to add something opinionated to it if the topic is strongly felt.
Firn