This sounds right to me: most of the comments I've written, on most sites, haven't been useful to me socially. The people I was talking to were strangers and remained strangers. But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something; sometimes my comments helped other people understand something; and sometimes, very often, reading other people's comments helped me understand something. So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things.

That said, there's another problem with comment culture that seems worth mentioning. I seem to have gotten good at expressing thoughts that fit in a comment. That gives me a false sense of competence; but when I need to write something longer, like a blog post several pages long, the structure just completely falls apart. And writing a book I can't even imagine. It seems writing at different lengths is essentially different skills, which need to be practiced separately. And if that's the case, then as Annie Dillard says, why not just write something long to begin with? I'm actually thinking of that now.

I want you to know I read this comment and appreciated it.

I have just finished writing a book. It took fifty-five months from its inception. Twenty-four months since I signed the contract, and I was thirteen months late. I have written books before, and this was a book on something that I am pretty much the only authority on (my own methods of working), but still it was a slog. This book is the last one. Never again. It's so overwhelming to me. I felt like some hermit building a church on an island.

I got the final proofs of the thing, today. It's a wonderful sense of accomplishment. But, no, never again!

> So it's not valuable for socializing, but it is valuable for other things.

I think what you described up to this point is a valuable form of socializing—exchanging information. So maybe “comment culture” isn’t absolutely valuable, but I guess that makes it no different than other forms of socialization; dependent on how useful the interaction is to the parties involved.

marginalia_nu put it well elsewhere

> It shouldn't be taken as a replacement for having a social life, but can be a very good complement if your social life isn't as intellectually stimulating as you would like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45147454

And it looks like this is where the author of this blog post erred.

Your last part about long-form writing is interesting and one of the consequences of frequent commenting, microblogging and short-form communications in general that I can relate to. The two practices do feel separate. I figure they’re about as distinct from one another as a conversation is to a lecture.

> But sometimes the act of commenting helped me understand something;

I write many more comments that never get posted. The act of writing forces clarification of thought which I find very useful.

for me, commenting is a test to see if i 've gone crazy, or of there still are people out there who would agree to my point.