Signal-to-Nothing Ratio

First, the title of your article is all about getting people to click on it. If I write something like "Technology is Heroin" for a title, a lot of people are going to be curious and click to the link. The title exists for one purpose only: to screw with people's brains enough to get them to click over. By the way, in this manner article titles are just like resumes -- when done well they elicit interest. And that's all they do.

Second, the content of your article is consumed because of expected emotional impact. They may not want to acknowledge that up front, but that's the way human minds work. I want to read "Agile Ruined My Life" because I'm either an agile supporter or denier, and either way I'm got some emotional stake in the piece. Hell, for the agile piece even if you were apathetic about agile, having somebody talk about their life being ruined over something like technology rituals and principles is an intriguing concept.

Third, people comment and share your article because of the expected emotional impact on others, even if they are unable to quite put it that way. It's all about emotional impact.

And there's the rub: people are emotional creatures, no matter how much we like to dress that fact up in reason. The vast majority of that time we're able to cover up our base emotions with a heavy layer of logic and reasoning, so much so that most of us have long forgotten what are true selves our like. There are lots of words for this cool little magic trick we do, but let's go with "apathy". For most of the things we don't care deeply about, we can read an article taking any kind of position at all and still stay mostly detached. This is good. A pervasive apathy keeps us from living an emotional roller-coaster.

Why do folks comment? Because your writing has touched them emotionally. It's not that they "get it" or "don't get it", and it's not because you have the wisdom of Socrates or the foresight of the Oracle at Delphi. It's because you touched on a nerve. Yes, they'll couch what they say in terms of intellectual analysis, but you can be sure that the reasoning could go for or against your thesis -- it's really more dependent on the emotional nature of the commenter than your style (aside from silly amateurish errors and structural issues that you might make, of course)

Because the vast majority of us keep our emotions in check with our apathy, the vast, vast, vast majority of folks will never say anything about your article, no matter what their opinion of the value of your work

This last one gave me the biggest "ah-ha!" moment. Many years ago, right after I started publishing my blog, I was able to look at traffic, and there was a boatload of folks dropping by that never said squat. It was something like 400 or more readers came by for a particular article before I got one comment. I had no idea what to make of this. I figured this was just some sort of marketing factor. Now, of course, I know why it happens.

So I didn't understand why people were commenting, and I didn't understand how many were commenting. My initial stab at ratios was way off too. It's more like this:

The tiny marks at the ends of the normal distribution curve are the folks who were impacted either in a positive or a negative manner. The rest of the area are people -- people with useful and insightful things to say, people who may have liked or disliked your article, but people who are mostly apathetic about most things, just like you are. Just like we all are.

ADDENDUM: There are some natural conclusions that fall out of this analysis for people making a business of blogging, such as "write for traffic, not for comments". On the other hand, people who make emotionally-impactful comments will tend to drag in a much larger audience than your writing by yourself. (Hence the reason why many sites use sock puppets. An article author can take one emotional position on a topic, and three commenters can stake out other emotional spots in juxtaposition to the article's thesis. This invites people of any persuasion to either announce their agreement or disagreement and then support their emotional response. Or for nerds, it brings in the shaded areas of the curves towards the middle a bit)

I've been very happy just blogging for myself, so I don't think about this as much as I used to, but it's still fascinating observing the difference between what we think we are doing and what we are actually doing when it comes to web behavior. For those trying to turn blogging into a paycheck (are the folks who are still trying to do this?), many times we think our writing is "sick" and we need to "get well" when in fact we're looking at the wrong metric entirely. We're not sick, we just need to keep trying.