when I look at images from 10 years ago they have tons of comments but that isn't the case these days
Posted under General
I would also say a lot of those older comments wouldn't be as acceptable now, so many of them are exactly the kind of inane, useless one liners the guidelines warn against. Most of the regulars don't make those sorts of comments anymore, and the non-regulars aren't around often enough to leave very many comments at all.
doublepassman said:
when I look at images from 10 years ago they have tons of comments but that isn't the case these days
Most of the comments you speak of are just meaningless chatter rather than any kind of productive discussion. The comment sections on older posts are frequently full of meme spam and roleplaying and dumb statements about how sexy character_X's ass is. These are exactly the sort of comments that have always tended to piss off Danbooru's major contributors (see here and here and here, for starters) so it's no surprise that there are now rules about the quality of comments users allowed on this site. Users who persist in making such comments tend to get banned for it, and the comments themselves usually get downvoted into invisibility. Bad comments still pop up on a daily basis, but they don't appear to be nearly as prevalent these days as they are on historical posts.
Though to be fair, the comments at one point *were* intended to be a pace to ask questions, discuss, and make (meaningful) comments about specific posts. It wasn't as harsh as our policy on the forums to keep things 100% productive and focused on Danbooru's functionality. I think a big part of what happened though was the massive increase in userbase and volume of posts. At one point a significant number of the site's users would see a significant number of the comments on the site. Now, it's probably much less likely that someone that might have otherwise replied to a question in the comments would see that question. As a result people stopped using that functionality so much.
I think much of the functionality of how the comments were used probably also moved to the Discord at this point (or the IRC chat back in the day). Though I can't say I am/was active on either (the latter I barely knew existed).
It seems in the early days it was not necessary to have an account to comment, that's why there are so many "MD Anonymous" comments in old images. This naturally encouraged casual visitors to comment anything that crossed their minds in every picture, with obvious results (you can visit porn-centric imageboards like Rule34 to get an idea of the low-effort comments that were ubiquitous in old pics.
Nowadays the only pics that seem to get lots of comments are the ones of hugely popular franchises, like Fate, Pokemon, or Touhou (but even Touhou doesn't get the ammount of comments it used to get compared to the hot gatchas of the moment).
I attribute it mostly to what Unbreakable said; the volume of uploads is so huge nowadays that people can't afford commenting on every little pic, so they focus on the popular stuff that's likely to get noticed.
SSJG said:
The volume of uploads is so huge nowadays that people can't afford commenting on every little pic, so they focus on the popular stuff that's likely to get noticed.
Well rather, it's more that the volume of uploads is so big, most stuff gets overshadowed. Usually there are comments on high-scoring posts.
Would be interesting to see a graph comparing the amount of artwork uploads to the amount of comments. I feel like this is a case like Touhou, where the amount of uploads didn't change, but the amount of uploads other copyrights is so big, it's more "thinly spread".
SSJG said:
It seems in the early days it was not necessary to have an account to comment, that's why there are so many "MD Anonymous" comments in old images.
There was an anonymous commenting mode long long long ago (like in the first year or two of the site), but it went away pretty early, and you still needed an account to use it. It sort of went against the philosophy we moved towards in trying to foster good quality and accountability.
A lot of the "MD Anonymous" comments you see though weren't anonymous at all at the time and belong to very old accounts that got purged (the reason most low user IDs are no longer assigned). I think that happened shortly after Danbooru first blew up in popularity and ended up closing to the public for a while and went invite-only in an effort to reign things in and allow us to figure things out in terms of rules and policies (a lot of the earliest *booru clones date from that time)