On Blog Comments
Leaving funny comments is a lost art.
It was once practiced in public restrooms across this nation, then gang members and lonely homosexuals ruined it for everyone.
Later there was the CB radio, and still later the online chat room. These innovations allowed for snarky comments, but because they inherently rewarded volume over substance, quality took a dive too.
Part One: Getting Started
Now we have websites and blogs. There are a few types of comments I really enjoy, they are:
1) funny or witty comments
2) comments that are funny because they are interesting and point out something I missed
3) Straight-ahead interesting comments
4) Comments that handle me roughly or call me a fool or a liar or worse
5) A simple “I was here. I read this.” and maybe your city or name or a link to who you are that read this
A writer for a website once asked me: How do I get more people to comment on the things that I write?
It’s either simple or somewhat complex:
Simple:
Be a reasonably attractive girl with a clear path to a picture of yourself.
See Romi41’s Example of this below, easily found on her “about me” page:
Notice something else: 77 GD comments!
This is not to say that Romi isn’t an interesting girl, she is, but being a girl with a picture sort of helps lonely male bloggers think that they’ve connected with a girl, on her blog.
Without looking I will say the comments are 70% male (probably including me) when her blog is patently female oriented. This is the blog equivalent of a pack of horny assholes approaching an obvious “Girls Night Out”, only to be used as fodder for why “Girls Night” is important and why men are horny assholes.
Complex:
Write something where you take a clear stand on an issue. Be iconoclastic inconspicuously. Don’t try to take down the big targets: intolerance, uneven distribution of wealth, celebrity worship– no no, aim lower: your town, yourself, your friends, the stuff you guys like.
Kill your idols.
Part Two: An Introduction To Player Hating
There’s an old advertising saw that goes “if you want to people to love you, you must first decide who hates you”.
Find your enemies.
Note the title of this blog is Misanthropy Today, which means sort of a disdain for humankind in general. This is hyperbole but feel free to hyperbole away.
The chart below may assist you:
WRONG!…. …Now You’ve Got It!
PETA Members……………. Furries
Women ……………….Bitches
Democrats …………………..Pants-Wetting Liberals
Someone Who Disagrees w/ You……………… Pedophile
George Bush……………………… Hitler
Handsome Actor……………………….. Homo
Heiress Who Drinks/Sex0rs About As Much As You…………………………. Whore
Jerk …………………….Shithead
Feel free to fill in your own. Giggle to yourself if they are hypocritical:
This is a blog, not a church!
Also, you’ll find that most bloggers are not great writers and will make it clear early that their only qualification is their willingness to try. If you have even marginal writing skills, go to their blogs and make fun of them in the comments section.
This is Step 3 of my simple 3 Part System to get comments on your blog.
Not to put Romi on the spot again, but i’ve wandered around to all corners of the blog world, and she comments on just about all of them. There’s not a sewer drain in Chinatown that Romi wouldn’t rappel down, strike a match and leave a comment. Do this from time to time if you want some good rabid traffic.
Quick Blog Comment Review:
Wrongo: lol. great post, perhaps check out my little nook on the web sometime 
Correcto: This post about that obscure “Leave Britney Alone” video really rocked my world. I have a prediction: one day, an internet website will host such videos for all to see and comment upon, and this video join the internet canon and it’s stupidity will be known to all. Thanks for being a pioneer towards that end!
Note #1 is friendly and earnest; straightforward. All wrong.
Now #2 is sarcastic and world-weary. It doesn’t have time for this crap, but does have time to comment about why it doesn’t have time for this crap. It’s those who know that something is stupid and worthless once it has attained the highest level of fame and popularity. Rather than share a cheap yet unifying pop-culture moment with our brethren we run to safe distance to make fun of our brethren. It’s you and me.
Part III: Be Yourself
Next: when you sit down to write, your first instinct will be to expose the obfuscated, share universal truths and experiences, right the wrongs; perform self therapy.
Again, this is all wrong.
Observe my post titled The Time I Heard Ashley Olsen Rip One In Whole Foods Supermarket.
Now, is this account true? Well it depends on what you consider true. If we’re talking universal or absolute truth, then it may be. Ashley Olsen may have indeed farted in Whole Foods that day I took the picture, and at this point it would be difficult to prove or disprove.
But the fact of the matter is, i’m a blogger (and a pretty bad one at that) and my job is to get asses in the seats. 100k or so individuals read that story. If success is measured by eyeballs, then: lie away.
The idea that bloggers need to tell the truth is a pernicious lie, only meant to handicap them into the same playing field as reporters and dissuade meddling into the world of fiction writers, who require Masters degrees in English and uncomfortable childhoods in Connecticut or Massachusetts where they were urged to be doctors or lawyers but rebelled by being best-selling authors instead.
Conclusion:
While I stated that this post was about blog comments, it’s probably more about blogging on a whole. This blog began out of boredom, as an exercise to test a few internet marketing ideas I had, and reasons I mentioned before in the part about stupid reasons for blogging.
From this blog I have culled:
- A fancy Nokia N series phone, compliments of Nokia, for writing a negative diatribe about the iPhone. I looked at it in the box, decided I didn’t need such fance and there it sits.
- Two seats at exclusive film screenings, which I could have probably gotten just as easily through my employ at an online media conglomerate
- A few random female admirers: one of whom lives in Kansas City, the other in Dubai. Both have said i’m probably their soul mate and they’d marry me or at least give me incredible sex, should I ever visit their locale.
- A few wacko emails from people offering me lackey writing jobs to requests that I write nice things about their products (i’m looking at you Nokia, among a few others)
- Ok– it was pretty fun, altogether.
The first post I ever wrote was ironically enough, titled “blogging”, here it is
Chin up, and all that stuff.
-AF
Random Posts
Loading…
Check out my friends @ CraigsLOL
Loading ...
lol, great post
Haha…holy crap, I didn’t know I was immortalized in this post, but since I’m such a comment-tramp who works my way around, I knew I’d get here eventually
You know what, you’re absolutely right in what you said about getting asses in the seats…I am not here to fuck around in the sense of writing about what I had for breakfast, with no care in the world if only me and my cat end up reading it…and for me to even claim that I don’t care about wanting to build an audience, would be a genuinely insincere statement, meant to put me on a pedestal that I would very soon fall off of…
FACTS: I am smart and cool and talented and funny (yeah I said it), and the world needs more of that, so I will come and find you, comment on your blog, and lure you over to my skank-a-licious site o’ fun.
Word.
Doctors in Connecticut
Why didn’t anyone tell me about this blog earlier? Lol. Seriously, awesome work on this post (along with your other posts…) Keep it up!
lol, great post
[...] wrote this because I found an interesting article on Misanthropy Today. The article was “On Blog Comments”. It talks about how comments went from witty things on bathroom stalls to basically empty and [...]
The good resource should be brought in bookmarks
When I first started my recent blogging adventure, I was looking up and down, across the whole blogosphere for ways to get traffic.
I got it, and then I was trying to get comments, why aren’t people commenting, I thought.
Well, this entry is exactly what I could have used back then, and I appreciate you being about three months too late.
If you think you have seen some sad blogs you wanna get yourself over to twitter and watch those R’ Tards tweeting each other banal shit. Like “wow cindy did you really have a bad day at work?”. Yes she did thats why she said it in less than 140 words!
I post there I wont lie. I wait until a so called celebrity has fallen for one of my pathetic fake admiration tweets “oh you are so funny, i thought you were great in Police Academy 10. I wish I could lick one of your turds!” You know the type of thing. Once they reply and they always do at the start to you know show there care about their fans. I bombard them with the most banal, shit scraping bollocks. I particulary love picking on Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson. Anything they say I reply to. Here’s one of my fav’s “what you two girls are doing is WRONG…you should at least be taping it”. I guess they get it cause they haven’t blocked me. Another is John Mayer. For such a cool guitar player he sounds so fucking femmy you would not believe it. He will say something like “just finished a song…if we were all just balls of love giving each other love, wouldn’t we just be love?” Or some shit!
I’m gonna start a blog. It will go down in history as the worst blog ever. Infact I think they will probably riot in Iran over it. So I appreciate this site for teaching me how to do it RIGHT. This blog is the Soul Train of Blogs. I want to lick its turd. And I mean that sincerely. I will put in in a song if necessary. But anyhow, great article on blogging my friend.
Thanks Billy, I appreciate your comments here since they are usually blog-post length to begin with.
A few suggestions for blogging:
- Pick a topic that you can pretty much write about every day without running out of material.
- Use wordpress.com first (its easily upgraded to .org later) or just start off with a dedicated domain and hosting with wordpress.org. If you aren’t technically savvy at all let me know and I can help you out.
- Let me know when you start your blog, i’ll put your link up over there where it says “links” so that people who read this blog can read yours.
Cheers Andy. Much appreciated. I am tring to think of things that I might write about. I dont think I could come across as serious as I do nothing but take the piss out of everything. Something funny happens to me at least once a day and if it doesn’t I will make it up.
Up to now I have jotted down notes on things I like and don’t like. It took me an hour to get off the don’t like section.
I tend to get a generous amount of tweets from Celebs up until they block me for being drunk and disorderly.
Anyway take care, speak soon.
The distinction that is really important in the structure of small matter is whether atoms are bound together by those Heitler-London forces or whether they are not. ,