I think the next priority for site health is getting a higher percentage of posts to have comments on them. We have sort of an inverted version of the "lurker's dilemma" going on here. On most sites, you have a 90-9-1 rule where 90% vote, 9% comment, 1% post. We have the opposite.

In the last 24 hours, we've had 17 unique users post and 11 unique users comment. That number for comments is higher than typical, and often the numbers can be worse. Right now, about half of the posts have comments on them. This is also, as of late, an unusually positive result. One that would be nice to continue. So I guess it's odd for me to address this on a bit of a positive day. So I'll pretend that isn't the case.

Quite often, we've become a posting exclusive userbase. And I guess that's ok if people are finding content they want to see. But it means we are missing out on users who want to discuss things. There will be a good number of people who see the site and only have a one-time visit if they see it's not a place where discussion is reliably present. This ultimately feeds back on the same problem. Then we retain users who primarily post (nothing wrong with that) but with the absence of users who primarily comment.

I don't think the issue is that we don't comment generally. It's that we need more users who contribute to the first and second comments on a post. We've shown in the past that our group is very open to having discussions. But our post volume seems to far outstrip our ability to start new conversations in these threads. The main sequence of sites doesn't have this problem and follows a 90-9-1 distribution, while we follow a 90-1-9 distribution.

I have several ideas on how to improve this. Last night I also asked AI to give me a "Phd" on this subject. I had no idea how readily AI would print a textbook, but it did. I took notes and managed to pump out a list of 100 dev tasks I can take tied to it and are now noted in my task system. We'll see how quickly I can knock them out. Each of them will trickle into place over a month or so.

But before I work on those, I want to open up the floor for others' novel ideas for tricks we could use to encourage first and second comments in a thread. Then your ideas can join the list of things I'm doing. I don't want to share too much of my list because I don't want to pollute your fresh ideas, but they are all good stuff.

One thing I have already done, which doesn't do anything unless I tell you about it, is that I've re-tuned two parameters. I reduced the "free comment" each post gets for the sort from 1 to 1/3rd. The number of comments a thread has is a part of the sort algorithm, and it can only take non-zero values. So effectively for sort perposes an empty thread had a comment count of 1. It now has a comment count of 0.33, and a thread with a comment will have 1.33. So a first comment now boosts that factor by 4x rather than 2x as it did before (1->2 VS 0.3->1.3). The other thing I did was I tripled the baseline weight of the comment factor in the default sort. I may actually push that number higher.

So what this means is it is even better to get a first comment on a thread than it was before, by about 6x what it was before. This encourages seed commenting, which I think is good for a number of reasons. It's not bad to not only share something, but also share your own thoughts about it. I think there are several sites where this isn't the norm and commenting on your own post is seen as weird, but I think it would be ok for it to be the norm here. Seed comments help invite more people to the conversation and reduce pressure on someone else to make the first comment. In theory, as a poster you are already familiar with the material and so sharing an initial thought should be comparatively easier for them than for anyone else.

Also, because of the way the alg works (and re-tuned to be even more so now), a first comment is basically equal to a super upvote over the lifetime of that post.

Anyway, this thread isn't about my ideas. It's about your ideas. How do we encourage more first comments and second comments? Those are the critical ones to get a conversation started. I'm looking for really unique ideas.

I still need to create a metric for unique conversation starters (users) in 24h so I can track this. But besides ideas, which is the main focus of the thread, if you want to help me boost that number, try to join the list once a day. Once a day try to comment on one thing that is currently empty. I think if I can convince a large number of people to do that we'll never see a wall of empty as we can sometimes see. But after I add these UI improvements plus your ideas that will also help.

Give me the most unique ideas you've got.