I personally have found the Daily Camera comment sections to be more people shouting past each other than a reasoned discussion. Seems to play into the Boulder psyche that everyone knows what is right and any difference of opinion is to be corrected, not discussed.
So as an experiment I pulled out the number of comments by person (love regular expressions) and dumped them in to Excel (download spreadsheet). I picked these because of the large number of comments so the results are more statistically valid. Feb 8 (96) and Feb 13 (92) Letters to the editor, Crystal Gray story (111), Land Grab story (267), and the Impeachment story (134). (And my totals - 2, 1, 6, 1, 0).
What jumped out at me was there are a couple of people who, between them, tend to monopolize the conversation. In the letters to the editor about 50% of the comments are from just 4 people. Even the Land Grab story with 267 comments from 108 unique logins, 4 people were over 25% of the comments.
This isn't a conversation, this is 4 people preaching.
I've also noticed that surfrider's comments tend to be twice my number. I wonder if he/she thinks the two of us are in a comment quantity contest (if so dude - you win). (Click graph for larger copy.)
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So there you go - a small picture of who is commenting, and how much.
