Hey there,

Quickly want to share that FiveThirtyEight  is conducting a poll about why people comment (or not).  Who better to answer that question than you!

My favorite bar in my old neighborhood used to have an Oscars night party. They’d print their own ballots and determine winners by the volume of cheering as each nominee was read aloud. That was fun but it was the discussion at my end of the bar that I enjoyed more. I could hear more and I learned more.

Yesterday, we published our findings from studying comments related to Oscar® nominated films. We couldn’t cover all that we discovered in one post. This next batch of findings looks at what surprised us and drove discussions in interesting ways.

I’m Jim, I’ve been working with startups since the mid-’90s, most recently helping publishers be more successful with Disqus. I may also be the most active commenter currently employed by Disqus.

At Disqus, we know that people choose to express themselves freely and openly in online communities. They can choose what they want to say, where they want to say it and how they choose to identify themselves when they do. And many of the people who use Disqus do this under a pseudonym — a handle or nickname that isn’t the person’s actual name.

Henry Anatole Grunwald, long-time editor of TIME, once said, “Journalism can never be silent: That is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air.”

In today’s ever-connected world, people of all colors, stripes and backgrounds are now part of that journalistic struggle — they share stories, provide commentary and are just as part of the news as the sources, writers, and editors.