Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“After much experimentation and discussion, we’ve concluded that the comment sections on NPR.org stories are not providing a useful experience for the vast majority of our users,”— Scott Montgomery, former managing editor for digital news
There’s some old advice that’s typically offered to speakers giving presentations to groups pf people that goes something like this: If one person in the audience has a question, chances are that there are more than a few other people out there that have that same question. Based on my own experience making presentations over the years, this sounds like that might be true or is it an “illusion of truth?”
The illusion of truth effect is the tendency of some people to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. The first condition is logical, as many people compare new information with what they already know to be true.
Why am I wasting a whole blog post on what might be called an exercise in semantics? I once asked my 2500 or so Instagram followers (@joefarace) if they wanted to see photographs of the fourth and fifth-placed models in my list of “most popular models” but only one person responded with a yes. Nobody said NO, by the way, The question then is how many “air comments,” as Mary calls them, does that represent?” I could not find any data on the ratio of actual comments/questions/answers vs what people are really thinking except…
Here is some data that were gathered from a probability sample of Americans by The GfK Group (formerly Knowledge Networks): 55.0% of Americans have left an online comment and 77.9% have read the comments at some point.
So how many positive “air comments” does that one response yes represent? I don’t know but looking at the number of page views and likes that I got with the post about the fourth most popular model I had to make a decision whether or not to continue the series. Hint: I didn’t.
If anyone does have a question or comment, they can state it by clicking on the Contact page and asking. The only difference between using an email response like this and having a comments section is the lack of visibility for the questioner. If that concerns you, I directly respond to this blog’s readers in my occasional Q&A posts, so I promise you won’t be ignored.
And to answer a question that I’ve been asked and answered before: Comments are not supported on this and my car photography blog because I don’t have time to respond to them. And it’s been my experience that people who have a comment section on their blog seldom respond to them anyway! Exception: I do allow comments on my YouTube channel. You see, I created these blogs and my YouTube channel as well.for therapeutic and altruistic reasons and derive no, zero, none, nada income from any of them. The ads you see here don’t begin cover the actual operating costs. It all comes out of my check book. However, if any company or individual would like to change that, I am open to all kinds of sponsorships. Just click that Contact page and let’s make a deal.
My out-of-print film-based book Part-Time Glamour Photography: Full-Time Income, is available new for $28.99 with used copies starting around five bucks as I write this. Yes, it’s about shooting with film cameras but there’s still lots of useful information and that used price is hard to beat! The newer, digital oriented Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography, is available new for $23.50 or starting around twenty-three bucks used as I write this. The Kindle version is $19.99 for those preferring a digital format.