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 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’s Canada. In life all politics is local: on blogs all politics is national.
3. The more personal the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on you for every one with an ill-informed opinion on politics.
4. The greater the number of comments to a post, the lower their overall quality.
5. A soft answer turneth away trolls.
6. All of my commenters are excepted from all of the above rules.
Aaron wrote: "There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on politics for every one with an ill-informed opinion about philosophy or poetry."
Way wrong. The proportion, that is. By a factor of 10. At least.
As to the rest of your propositions: Sound right to me.
ACD
I just couldn’t resist leaving a comment to that post
Your theory seems to be correct. I got ten comments once when I just posted the word "Testing". I often get hardly any for posts which take hours to research (handy extra tip: if you want comments, never blog about the Ossetians).
Extra tip? "If you want comments, never blog about the Ossetians" has to be at least a lemma or something.
"I got ten comments once when I just posted the word "Testing"."
Well, of course. Why do people leave comments? To attract people to their blogs. And when you see a post labeled "Testing" with ten comments, can you resist looking to see what they are? I can’t.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that last one, Aaron. Stalin’s mom was an Ossetian!
And there will always be at least one commenter who has never read your blog before and assumes he knows all about you and your politics.
Well, heck, you couldn’t have posted this about eight months ago? Ah, me. So much grief might have been avoided. It’s all clear to me now. Well, better late than…naw, never mind. Guess I’ve already brought us to the point of diminishing returns on the comments here. Sorry about that.