Comments Are Currency

Look, I want comments. Reader comments are the way to measure my worth as a writer, and, by extension, as a person.

I crave them the way I crave smack. I recently got over 100 comments for the first time, on my last The Huffington Post piece, and I have to say I was… quietly satisfied… about crossing the three-digit comment mark. I had a moment. I celebrated that night with an extra bottle of champagne and a special iced smack drink I make sometimes.

In the spirit of writerly camaraderie, I hope for my writer friends to get lots of comments, but then I’m envious when they do. So I leave anonymous comments about how their articles stink.

I want at least 2,000 comments next time I write something. (Luckily, I think at HuffPost there are exactly as many commenters as there are bloggers: roughly 10,000 of each.) Nothing’s ever enough for me, or anyone.

Numbers matter. After something goes live, we writers check back obsessively to see how many comments we’ve gotten. I notice you guys don’t leave many comments here on UsedWigs. Because you are stingey people. CHANGE THAT.

But the question is: Where do you even begin reading a comments section with thousands of comments in it? And when do you stop? Like so much on the Internet, comments sections can be a tragic time waster.

When I started contributing to Arianna’s site, a blogger friend told me NEVER to respond to commenters. “It’s a power differential,” he said.

Fine, I get it, I’m very available to elitism, but I like comments because… I actually do want to have a dialogue with my readers (all four of you), something that wasn’t possible back when I started writing, for print publication, over a decade ago. A back-and-forth! I was so excited when I got my first “f*ck you” from a commenter on my first HuffPost piece! “F*ck you, Shrake!” Made me smile.

When it comes to comments, websites and bloggers have choices. Do you allow comments at all? Do you as the site owner or blogger respond personally to comments? (Historically, some writers have gotten in trouble for commenting under an alias — at their own sites and others’! — and pumping themselves up, etc.) Do you moderate the comments or let it be a free-for-all? Moderating means deleting people, banning them, etc. Do you want to be that bossy? Unwebocratic?

When I was young, before the Internet was set up, ordinary folks had one option for responding to something they read. They could write a letter to the editor of the newspaper or magazine in which the article appeared. Maybe it would get printed, but the chances were mighty slim.

If you could say something that caught the interest of the editorial powers-that-be, you’d be the star of your block that day. You’d be famous!

But that was it. Then they invented the Internet, and with it soon came a chaotic marketplace of shitty ideas and profanity.

There was a time when UsedWigs was young, before it went blog, that we didn’t have comments. If someone had something to say about something I wrote, they sent me an e-mail, and I ignored them. It was the opposite of a free-for-all.

Nowadays literally anybody who can use a computer is able to be the star of their block in their own mind, all day, every day. We now have what I will call the Lumpen-Commentariat: They are the “trolls,” the hopelessly illiterate or drunk or insane underclass that insist on typing their thousands of comments per day, on getting in on the action and making their opinions known… way underneath what I’ll call the Blogeoisie (blog-wah-zee) — the uppity people who own blogs (or, like me, “rent” space at other people’s because they don’t know how to get their own); and the Commentariat — the people who write the blogs.

Case Study: David

One comments section I can never resist reading for an hour at a time is the one situated next to any column by David Broder at the Washington Post. It represents an intense competition among commenters to humiliate and eviscerate this old man who looks like he’s constipated, the reputed “Dean of the Washington Press Corps,” and it is superb insult comedy.

Everyone knows Broder can’t possibly be looking at the comments, because he’s Andy Rooney’s-age-plus, but it’s fun to think of how cranky he must be because he doesn’t get why the readers are allowed to send all these “electric letters” or whatever they are, directly to him in that small type and Who are these people, anyway? He’s an important man laboring pen-in-hand over his steno pad to come up with incomparably obvious columns every few days (such as the recent “I’ve Noticed Hillary and Barack Are Two of the Main People Running for President” by David Broder). So they taunt him, saying how he needs to retire, holding him to account for helping elect Bush 2, and just… I don’t know, running rhetorical circles around him. Many of the comments are such perfect specimens of verbal acidity, it makes me gaga.

That’s what I want. Sock it to me. When you’re ready. I’ll be feverishly refreshing this page, drinking my delicious, special, ice-cold Smack-Aid. Let the dialogue roll.

And when I cyber-die, please put “Leave a Comment” on my e-tombstone.

Read more SM SHRAKE at You Wanna Know What? and The Shrake-tionary.

TAGS: Andy Rooney • Archie Bunker • Arianna Huffington • Barack Obama • Comments • David Broder • Heroin • Hillary Clinton • Internet • The Huffington Post