Without getting too far into the particulars of Amanda's argument about Ross Douthat, I'd suggest that Brad DeLong's lament that his post on Ross Douthat and sex got more comments than his post on the Treasury Plan is fundamentally misguided: The number of comments a post gets is not, in any way, analogous to the importance attached to the post by commenters. As example, a post I wrote yesterday on the DMV -- in which I unwisely made a glib joke about Kafka -- amassed 50 comments. A post I wrote summarizing an interview with the Swedish Finance Minister who ran his country's nationalization effort got exactly zero comments. Comments are not a reflection of how much your audience cares about a topic. They are a reflection of how much they have to say on it. As a blogger, I think that actually exerts a subtly pernicious influence on my writing. The posts I write that get the least comments are those with actual reporting in them: Congress did this, or an administration official explained that. The second worst are wonky posts. It's easy enough to understand why those pieces end with single digit comment sections: There's less to say about a fact than about an argument. But since I, like many bloggers, use the vibrancy of my comment sections as a way to not feel like a crazy person ranting in cyberspace, too many low comment posts in a row and I itch to write some pieces that generate a bit of discussion and prove that my cyberfriends are still out there. I'm not sure that's always the best impulse.
