Not a drive-by posting! And cougars and jaguars and sabre-teeth, oh my!

[dakhun]

You know, if people are going to come back to LJ after an absence of several months, and make their "OMG I love LJ but it's too bad the volume of activity has fallen off" posts before hastily returning to Facebook, the least they can do is to REPLY to whatever comments they get on that post

Comments

[whitetail]

A few suggestions that might help you get more replies.

• One simple thing that usually works for me is to end posts with a question. This by itself will encourage responses.

• Leave room for discussion. If your posts are so thorough and detailed that you address all possible points and answer all possible questions about your subject yourself, then, at the end, you've really left us with nothing further to discuss.

• Avoid absolute, declarative statements and stridently-worded conclusions. If people perceive that your mind is totally made up on an issue, then they will feel like there is no point in discussing the matter because you have obviously already rejected all other possible points of view.

• Similarly, don't be condescending or overly pedantic. If you present yourself as a supreme authority whose knowledge, logic and wisdom are unchallengeable, it can intimidate your readers into silence, or worse, give people the impression that all you're really trying to do is provoke an argument.

• Be as terse as possible in getting your points across. I and many others simply skip over overly-wordy posts. It's my experience that pictures really are worth a thousand words, and moreover, illustrations always attract and hold people's attention. Many of my posts that get the most replies are ones that contain only a couple of sentences or short paragraphs, or in some cases, no words at all, only an illustration or two. Often, you can get the most discussion out of people by saying very little yourself.

• Finally, don't demand replies, or even indirectly shame people for not commenting, like you did here. This is almost guaranteed to discourage responses, because nobody appreciates being spoken to like that.

I should perhaps add that I really do enjoy your posts, and I do try and think of replies to everything you (and others on LJ) write about. If I can't come up with anything particularly intelligent or cogent to say within about 30 seconds, though, I have to move on. I think a lot of people are like that. If the right words don't come to mind pretty much right away, they probably aren't going to come at all, and instead of posting something inane, I think it's better to just keep my mouth shut.

[dakhun]

Rabs, these are very good points. And thanks, I like your posts too - yours have always been among the ones I'd rate as the high quality journals. Interestingly, I take a slightly different route to commenting: I'll decide within 30 seconds whether I want to reply to a post (or comment) but I will let that sit for a few minutes to think of what I want to say. Sometimes it takes longer. Often, the best ideas come when I am thinking about something else later.

BUT... I actually wasn't soliciting for comments on this post. In fact, I can't recall ever demanding replies to a post on LJ, except for asking who wants to join a group filter. I was specifically referring to ONE type of situation: one in which people do a drive-by posting to LJ after a protracted absence, and then drive off abandoning the post to the four winds. It would be far better if they would circle back and reply to at least some of the comments. Because someone abandoning their only post in a year is going to make people wonder if they should bother replying the next time they see a rare post from that person. And then that lack of interactivity further discourages them from ever posting again. That was the point of my post.

In any other situation, the normal rules apply.

[dakhun]

Mind you, I can definitely see how the original title "Would it hurt to reply once in a while? And cougars and jaguars and sabre-teeth, oh my!" could seem like a solicitation for replies.
So I will change it.

[whitetail]

BTW, I agree that the sabre-teeth were done to death by humans, as well as the rest of the Pleistocene megafauna. And actually, I believe the Holocene Mass Extinction is still underway, after a brief pause of a hundred or so centuries. Now, though, instead of killing off individual species, we're destroying entire habitats, and driving uncountable numbers of creatures to extinction. Unfortunately, this current mass extinction event probably won't end until its primary agent is itself extinct: Us. We're really long overdue for a mass die-off of our own. We may be the most numerous large animal on the planet right now, but that is simply not sustainable. Ultimately, I believe our species will bring about its own doom, and probably sooner in geologic time rather than later.

[dakhun]

I believe the Holocene Mass Extinction is still underway, after a brief pause of a hundred or so centuries.

That's probably the right way of looking at it. :-/ I see that a number of professional paleontologists and archaeologists share the view, that there's no real distinction between the Quaternary and Holocene extinction events. Although there's no consensus... yet.
The pause between the two different phases of the extinction occurred at different times in different parts of the world, so it may in fact be a continuous extinction event if you view it worldwide.