Average number of comments per post: Mi Yodeya vs the rest of the Stack Exchange Network

Question

[Thanks to msh210 for telling me how to make these calculations.¹]

I checked the average comments per post of the top 8 Stack Exchange Sites, to compare to Mi Yodeya:

Stack Overflow

• 89,126,736 comments
• 51,068,664 posts
• 1.75 comments per post

Mathematics

• 5,843,848 comments
• 2,834,045 posts
• 2.06 comments per post

Super User

• 1,995,887 comments
• 1,334,768 posts
• 1.5 comments per post

Ask Ubuntu

• 1,714,914 comments
• 1,050,246 posts
• 1.63 comments per post

Server Fault

• 1,189,351 comments
• 918,547 posts
• 1.29 comments per post

English Language & Usage

• 1,089,054 comments
• 452,229 posts
• 2.41 comments per post

Arqade

• 475,061 comments
• 334,319 posts
• 1.42 comments per post

Ask Different

• 421,383 comments
• 328,856 posts
• 1.28 comments per post

Mi Yodeya

• 305,154 comments
• 93,414 posts
• 3.27 comments per post

As you can see, Mi Yodeya out-comments the other sites by a tremendous amount. The combined average of those 8 sites is 1.67 compared to Mi Yodeya's 3.27. I.e. Mi Yodeya has just under twice the average amount of average comments.

In case the results of the above survey are not representative because those sites are much bigger than Mi Yodeya, I checked a couple of similar sites as well

Photography

• 184,484 comments
• 99,626 posts
• 1.85 comments per post

Philosophy

• 141,149 comments
• 53,390 posts
• 2.64 comments per posts

Islam

• 83,083 comments

• 48,882 posts

• 1.7 comments per post

Korean Language

• 4,004 comments

• 3,587 posts

• 1.12 comments per post

Here too the numbers are well below Mi Yodeya, with a combined average of 1.83 comments per post. The total average of both groups is 1.71 comments per post.

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1. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither?
2. Is there a particular reason, or reasons, why Mi Yodeya generates many more comments per post? E.g. the nature of the content is such that it usually requires more clarification, or it easily generates tangential discussions.
3. Should anything be done about this?

I personally like comments, and I think there are many comments that are very useful. (Note that while I don't have real data for this, my impression from checking the other sites was that Mi Yodeya also has a lot more active comments. I.e. it's not just that Mi Yodeya generates thousands of useless comments that are then deleted; it also generates useful comments that are kept. Unless that's just because of differences in moderation?)

What does everyone else think?

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^{1. Note that the numbers may be off by a fraction of a percent because it is possible that I looked at the second-to-most-recent post instead of the most recent post, or it is possible that a few more posts or comments have gone up since I collected the data. None of that should affect the results in anything remotely close to a significant way.}

Answer 1

Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither?

In my opinion, it's a bad thing.

First and most obviously, there's the signal-to-noise ratio. Comments have many purposes. (I mean de facto, not de jure). People use them to answer a question, to suggest a line of inquiry that can lead to an answer, to question the validity of the post, to suggest a broader/narrower question than the one asked, to link to a related post, to explain why the post should be closed/deleted, to explain why it shouldn't be closed/deleted, to make a joke about something in the post, to ask for a source for something in the post, to say they're glad the post was posted, to say the commenter had the same idea, to dispute some fact in or hypothesis of the post, to suggest a wording change to the post, to ask for clarification of a point in the post, and much more, plus to reply to any of the above, to reply to such a reply, and so on. Let's put aside for the moment the fact that most of those should not be comments and suppose it were true that they should be. The comments section would then be used for so many different things that it would be impossible to pick out the ones that were ever relevant and important, let alone the ones that still are, and the lasting value of all the comments is thus basically nil. (Trusting the up-arrows to know which comments are of lasting relevance or importance is a mistake.) And that's the actual situation on some of our posts (usually questions in my experience).

More importantly, comments on the question are often accepted by the asker as answers (anecdotally, I've seen many times that an asker referred to a comment as an "answer" or otherwise wrote as if his or her needs were filled). This is dangerous, even more so than the danger always inherent in communicating and teaching Torah in a forum like ours, because comments don't (really) have downvotes/edits, so those ways of determining/improving quality are basically gone, and because comments are even less likely to have citations to sources or subsequent comments seeking such citations than answers are.

Should anything be done about this?

Yes!

(Boy, am I glad you didn't ask what should. That I can't answer. But of course everyone should continue to flag comments for deletion as needed.)

Answer 2

I'm not sure if it is a good thing or not but I can think of 3 reasons this is so:

• Jews love to argue. You probably heard about the journalist who asked a rabbi "Why do Jews always answer a question by another question?" - answered the rabbi "Why not?" !
• more seriously, since the bar for answers is high, very often you see people slipping in answers without sources as comments to help out without needing the additional research
• also, I find that the gap between the most knowledgeable members of the community and new users is very large. So some questions need a lot of refinement and this takes place in comments

Recently, I've taken to flag "not useful anymore" comments a bit more aggressively. I'm always a bit worried to increase the mod workload but feel it makes everyone life simpler if they don't have to browse through lots of unneeded comments.