Dear Readers:
VTDigger has a less than 1 percent problem: 0.24 percent of all commenters (8,369 people) have dominated the conversation on our site.
The top 20 commenters have made 26 percent of all comments (92,162) on stories since VTDigger was founded in 2009.
We analyzed comment data because we have heard from many readers who complain that the debate is becoming polarized and threads are dominated by a few loud voices.
Here’s what we found:
- Gender: 77 percent of comments are made by men. Thirty-four percent of the commenters in 2014 were women, but they made only 23 percent of the comments.
- Word count: 47 percent of all comments are longer than 100 words; 14 percent are longer than 200 words.
- Participation: In 2014 we had a 42 percent increase in the number of comments on the site, but only a 6 percent increase in the number of commenters.
- 2014 was the first time we saw a slight decline in the number of first-time commenters.
- Posts from the single most frequent commenter made up 3 percent of the total comments ever made since 2009.
We want to hear from you
We’ve had people request a limit on the number of times people can comment on a single article so threads are not dominated by a few individuals engaged in back-and-forth dialogue.
We’ve also had requests to limit the character count to encourage brevity and succinct arguments.
We are now considering both of these limits on comments, and we’d like to hear from you.
Please weigh in and fill out the mini-survey below. MOBILE USERS: click here to complete survey.
