I should just start commenting on myself.

[andrewducker]

I've noticed that people gather where the other people are.

A simple heuristic for "is something interesting" is "are other people interested in it?" - which means that if you are scrolling through your friends list, skim-reading the more interesting posts, that a post with 30 comments on it is more likely to get your attention than one sitting uncommented.

I've noticed this on occasion - a post will sit uncommented for _ages_ and then someone comments, and then someone else, and the more people comment the more likely it is to cause other people to join in. And then, of course, it falls off of people's friends pages, and the comments dry up.

I'm sure there's a paper in this somewhere.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure comments on posts follow a power law distribution (without having done any actual sums), and you're right, there's plenty of papers in this. (e.g. Clay Shirky)

People are interested in people. Who'd have guessed?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

The secret is to add a comment to your own posting, so that there's always at least one comment and people may click to see what other people have said, and by then you've got them, bwa-ha-ha-ha etc. ;-)

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I've noticed that james_nicoll often posts the first comment on his posts (and sometimes the second and third too), rather than editing the text of the post with post-posting thoughts, and he seems to get quite a lot of comments ...

[soon_lee]

Mind you james_nicoll, also has a huge Friends_list.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Comments on LJ are clearly serving a kinf of karma/reputation index function.

I only read the comments on this when they got up to 3 :)

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that posts about people's commenting habits always get comments. (Posted before reading the other comments.) ;>

[soon_lee]

I've experienced the cascading effect too. I have a weekly update mailing list I send to friends, mainly local but also to the far-flung corners of the globe. Often weeks go by without any response. And then, just as I begin to think there's something wrong with the mailing list, I get multiple responses & responses to responses, and responses to responses to responses...

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

When I see a lot of comments, if it's on a webcomic or an lj news post I generally think "Oh jesus, American internet wankers are out in force." If it's on a personal lj, I generally think "two people are having a lengthy argument in the comments" or "someone is drama-queening or attention/comment-whoring."

I'm right more than I'm wrong.