It’s pretty obvious to anyone reading that commenting on Red94 has gone down drastically since years 1 and 2. We’d regularly get engagement on longer posts in those early years. Now, there’s barely nothing.
As an editor, it’s concerning. We’ve been putting out more content than ever (adding game previews and recaps as opposed to just the daily essays). Most strange is that traffic has been about the same; you all are still reading, but you’re just not talking.
So in that spirit, I seek your advice. Is there something we could be doing differently? Some different form of content you’d like to see?
Also, I wonder, have the various changes to the commenting interface turned you all away? I pose this hypothesis because just after the switch to Disqus, yesterday, Michael’s feature today has enjoyed more interaction than anything we saw when we had Livefyre. Was that the cause?
We started out in year 1 with the standard WordPress interface. Simple with no barriers to entry for guests.
Then I installed Disqus, like you see on the blog now:
With Disqus, we saw a slight drop. It might not have been immediately intuitive that you could comment anonymously as, unlike WordPress, you had to click to even arrive at the guest screen. But the drop was worth it as Disqus gave us threaded commenting and some other neat features we didn’t have with WordPress.
Then, this year, I switched to Livefyre and things just fell off completely, drastically, to unprecedented levels. In terms of interaction, Red94 this season has been dead.
Livefyre is hands down better than Disqus. You can view new comments in real-time and see who else is viewing the post, allowing for basically a virtual chatroom.
But I wonder–looking at it now–and with the drop, is it intuitive to you all that you can comment as a guest? The above is a screenshot of the option to comment anonymously. If I didn’t know better, I’d think, looking at that, that it was asking me for my Livefyre username. Is that the impression that you all got too? I’m wondering if this is what turned people away.
Anyways, your thoughts on any of this would be welcome. I can see from the numbers that you all have still been reading, so I greatly appreciate that. Now what can we do to bring interaction back?
If you want, you can shoot me a private email at [email protected]. Thanks again.
