The Comment Graveyard

Digg recently made a complete overhaul of their commenting system. Many reasons were cited, most notably how users were abusing the first post with replies (making the 12th reply to the 1st comment far more valuable than the actual 2nd comment). The changes were meant to make comments more usable for new users, even if it shook up the old users, and the old users were not happy about them.

However, I’m terribly interested to hear Digg’s thoughts on how the lower comments now perform. Where once a story was shown with all comments on a single page, now only the first 50 are, and a user must click to reveal the next 50 — it’s done dynamically, so once you click you now see comments 1-100 and not just comments 51-100. But it’s essentially an AJAX “browser fold” where things get hidden. Comment #2 has been appropriately promoted, but comment #51 has effectively been buried.

On an informal test with a highly active politics story, there were 200 total replies in the first 50 visible top-level comments. The next 50 posts, those that had been hidden, only had 6. This isn’t much of a surprise — Digg users aren’t the best at attention. Needing to click for more top-level stories is clearly a barrier, but is it comparable to the length of the page in the old system? Have these lower posts always had matching lower activity on them, or is this new “browser fold” now just an attention death-sentence?