Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url. In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or…
But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.
People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.
“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.
The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.
But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)
So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.
And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.
You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.