The comments section: A request to non-commenters, occasional commenters, and frequent commenters

We’ve published 193,208 comments on this blog, and I’ve loved almost all of them. Thanks so much!

And now I have some requests for you:

If you’ve never commented: Feel free to join in the fun, if you have something to add, a story to share, and especially if you disagree with something we posted. Don’t just stew in your own juices, being angry that we are Wrong on the Internet. We read all the comments, and if you see something we got wrong, this is your chance to correct the record, to engage in conversation with us, and even maybe to realize you were wrong. I’ve learned so much from comments, and lots of times I’ve changed my views. Even when I’m not convinced that I was wrong, I become aware of a failure of communication on my part. So, yeah, we’d appreciate your input. Share your stories.

If you occasionally comment: Thanks! and feel free to comment more, as discussed above. Your comments are interesting in themselves, they motivate us to continue posting on certain topics (when we get zero comments its kind of a bummer), and they help us refine our research as well as our communication. I learn a lot from blog comments.

If you frequently comment: Thanks—we really appreciate it! You keep a sense of continuity in the comments over periods of months and even years. Just one thing. Try to make whatever point you’re making just once in a thread. Or maybe twice if there’s a need to reply to another comment. But please do your best to avoid long exchanges in comments. I’ve been told that many people avoid participating in our comment threads or even avoid reading the comments entirely because they’re sick of seeing the same old arguments litigated endlessly. Again, I appreciate your comments! Just keep them within reason.

Unlike the Nate of 2024 but like the Nate of 2012, I appreciate an iterative back-and-forth, but if goes on too long, over and over again in thread after thread, it degrades the reading and commenting experience for everyone else. Thanks for understanding.

And, finally, if you’re a spammer: Just stop it! You can have the cleverest comment in the world—you can prove Fermat’s last theorem in the margin of your comment, whatever—; if it has spam links, it’s going into the spam folder. So don’t waste your time. Just do the right thing and buy an ad somewhere.