Gathering the Comments of the Web
I would still love to hear your feedback in the comments below. Enjoy!
My recent post about the else keyword in Python was a tremendous success (relative to my other posts), reaching 20,000+ unique visitors within about 24 hours. It was especially successful in Reddit’s /r/programming, where it got over 400 total upvotes and 130 comments. However, in the post’s own Disqus thread, there were only 3 comments (one of them was mine). Now, I get that people like to comment in the community where they came from - Reddit folks want to comment on the Reddit thread, HackerNews people want to mingle among themselves, people want to post their comments as twitter responds, etc., but as a blogger, I want people coming in from anywhere to see that there are 100+ comments on my post.
A friend of mine told me that he saw the post (which I also posted on my facebook wall) and that he didn’t know where to respond - on my wall, on my twitter account, on the Disqus thread - so many options!
It got us thinking together on how to solve this issue. Obviously we still want to maintain the separation of comment threads on their respective sites, but as a site owner / blogger, I would like my website to show all of them. So the solution is quite simple: a comment system like Disqus, which allows users to comment as usual on the thread, which is also tabbed with different communities. When you finish reading, you can see immediately how many comments there are in different communities. There was already a post I saw in HackerNews that used the HN API to display HN comments in your blog. I suggest taking it a step forward and creating a dynamic tool which works (with plugins, I imagine) for different communities.
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