After the huge success surrounding the downvote philosophy conversation, I'd like to raise another topic that, ironically enough, hasn't seem to have generated much of a pure discussion or analysis: comments themselves.



When do you feel compelled to write a comment? Whenever a video amuses you? Angers you? As a tactic to increase traffic to a video in the hopes of increasing its votes? Or to just give credit for the source of the video?



Or do you write in response to someone's rants? Along with many others, I've been a big proponent of encouraging people to keep their debate at the Sift civil; through a combination of cool heads and mutual respect, as well as the generally high intelligence of the user community here, VS has been remarkably successful in that regard, despite our penchant for heated debates about politics, religion, and other fun "not for the polite dinner table" issues. The level of discourse in an average comment thread here is like night and day compared to some of the inane chatter you get on the videos' original posting pages.



I've pushed my own views on this topic long enough - I'd like to know what other Sifters think: do you ever step back and think about the point of your comments and what their relationship is to the rest of your activity on the site? Are there any rules of thumb that you follow in your own postings?