{"id":449,"date":"2003-07-16T11:52:37","date_gmt":"2003-07-16T15:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=449"},"modified":"2007-02-22T10:26:51","modified_gmt":"2007-02-22T14:26:51","slug":"the-immutable-laws-of-blog-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=449","title":{"rendered":"The Immutable Laws of Blog Comments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1. The briefer and less substantive the post, the greater the number of comments. (<em>Lemma:<\/em> The briefer and less substantive the post, the likelier a link from <a href=\"http:\/\/instapundit.com\">Instapundit<\/a>. Not that I would know.)<\/p>\n<p>2. The more political the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on politics for every one with an ill-informed opinion on philosophy or poetry. This applies to U.S. politics only; nobody cares what goes on in your home town, or your home country if it&#8217;s Canada. In life all politics is local: on blogs all politics is national.<\/p>\n<p>3. The more personal the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on <em>you<\/em> for every one with an ill-informed opinion on politics. <\/p>\n<p>4. The greater the number of comments to a post, the lower their overall quality.<\/p>\n<p>5. A soft answer turneth away trolls.<\/p>\n<p>6. All of my commenters are excepted from all of the above rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1. The briefer and less substantive the post, the greater the number of comments. (Lemma: The briefer and less substantive the post, the likelier a link from Instapundit. Not that I would know.) 2. The more political the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on politics for <a href='https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=449' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-21-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}