“Is Obama the AntiChrist?”

Actually, this (when allowing for “more than one” as well) is probably the sole ticket to a post with substantial activity past 48 hours & more than a couple hundred comments.

It would be interesting to find a metric that allows us to compare “number of comments” to “quality of on-topic discussion, in terms of information exchanged and satisfaction of involved parties.” I imagine there’s a maximum that’s less than 100.

1. of commenters < # of comments, in most nontrivial cases, and the discrepancy between these numbers can tell you a lot about the thread, probably in turn correlating strongly with the type of post.

Declare the “END OF” something. Books, teaching, good television, bad doctors, an era, and epoch, a school of thought, a social pattern, a word, a meme, etc.

1) Shorter posts get more comments than longer posts.
2) Posts about the everyday life experiences of the poster get more comments but the comments tend to be very different depending on whether (a) the experience is a snarky, humorous one or (b) is a very serious, emotionally fraught one. (a) tend to create longer threads that bounce from story to story; (b) create long threads that contain short expressions of sympathy. Corollary: Eventually people stop expressing sympathy if the same poster has frequent experiences of a serious, bad or depressing nature, unless it is Scott Eric Kaufman being attacked once again by random strangers, automobile drivers, people fucking in his office or unsympathetic bureaucrats. But maybe SEK’s experiences are really 2a.
3) Posts which are seriously wrong get more comments. This is something I’ve discovered in teaching, too: a reading that has serious problems or errors (but is nevertheless interesting) is way more compelling to discuss for undergraduates than an impeccable work of scholarship. A post which is wacky, exaggerated, unreasonable, unpleasant or outright psychotic is way more likely to spark comments (as well as get links).

The NASA/Colbert thing was the second (3rd, 4th?) time he did something of this sort. The most memorable for me was the Hungarian bridge naming incident.