RSS: The Length Wars (Finale)

As promised, it has been a week since I have turned my feeds to full-text instead of excerpts. Although I didn't believe that anything would happen, I have noticed behavior changes since the change. Let me restate my thoughts on this once more. I believed that changing to full-text from excerpts would discourage commenting. This is mainly because by putting a new level of separation between the user and the comment form and because users now don't have to go to the site to read the full-text, they won't comment. "Out of sight, out of mind." I had my weekly talk with Lisa and the subject of commenting came up in sort of a comedic way:

So now it's a trade-off. Do I want more readers? Or do I want more commenters? It's a hard decision because I do like seeing that 300 or so people subscribe to my site. It's more of an ego boost than anything else. "Stroking the stats," as Lisa says. It encourages me to write if I know people are going to end up reading it. However, I have always wanted my entries to encourage conversation, and if that doesn't happen, what's the use? Looking at it another way, it's not the number of readers that make me feel like my content is compelling, it's the number of commenters. If my writing is that compelling, people will comment, rather than just read and move on.

As a lead-in to a future post, I should start commenting more as well. If anything, I hope this mini-series has helped a few people with their decisions¹.