Sunday, August 29, 2010

How retweeting and liking dumbs down the conversation on blogs

I've noticed on a bunch of blogs that I read that the comment sections are getting increasingly getting spammed by retweets, likes and a few google buzzes. It appears that 95% of "comments" (see example here: http://screencast.com/t/ZjA0ZTFm) are in fact simply people re-sharing the orginial content produced on the blog; on sites like paidcontent.org the ratio is often close to 100% re-sharing vs. original commentary. On the one hand, this is in line with stats stating that 90% of readers only consume but never create content, on the other hand I wonder what the purpose of all the retweeting/ liking/ buzzing really is if no value/ information/ insight is added to the original content. My suggestion for publishers would at least be to follow the techcrunch example and exclude re-sharing from the true comment section so they don't crowd out original insights.

 

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