We LOVE comments!

We LOVE comments!

Can you imagine doing your first stand-up comedy show? You drop your first joke…

…silence…

…blank stares from the audience.

How would that feel? I guess it’s better than being booed of stage, but not by much. 

It’s the same when posting online. You hope to get at least some reaction.

Positive Comments Mean a Lot to Us

Comments indicate that our post was worthwhile to engage with. A quick positive comment is incredibly rewarding!

In addition, positive comments are quite valuable. Comments signal to the social media platforms that you consider the post worth engaging with. This increases the likelihood of that post showing up in other people’s feeds and also increases the likelihood of our future posts showing up in your feed.

We would love it if you could drop just simple comments such as ‘Great post!’. It makes us feel appreciated, helps spreads our work, and makes sure you’ll continue to see our posts.

How to get your questions answered

Questions are also great: it shows that our post was interesting enough that you want more details. Take that, people who claim we only have 5-sec attention spans online.

We are very grateful for all questions we receive.

But questions take time to respond to. And there’s a lot more people asking questions than people to answer them.

We strongly encourage everyone in our community to respond to questions. While sometimes people specifically want our opinion, there are a lot of questions that others can perfectly answer as well. That would help to get a bit of the workload of our shoulders.

We try to answer as many questions as we can, but we have to keep in mind that we have to use our time as effective as possible.

For example, we don’t respond to comments in DM’s (direct messages). This is highly ineffective, as only one person would benefit from the answer, and others can’t join the discussion. Therefore, make sure your comments are on public platforms such as social media or our website.

Another aspect to keep in mind is whether questions are on topic.

The more related your question is to our post, the more likely that you get an answer. If we allow the comments section to be an off-topic Q&A, fewer people will read it because it’s no longer related to the post they just read.

If you take the effort to find a post that matches the topic of your question, we are much more likely to in the effort to respond (just google your topic + nutrition tactics).

We try to answer as many questions as we can with the time we have available. Especially on social media, it’s easy for us to miss your comment, so commenting on your question with a tag helps to bring it to our attention. While we might not get to all questions, but we keep our eyes on them. If a question keeps popping up a lot, it’s likely we’ll make specific content that allows us to go in more detail and reach more people.

Finally, the more effort that goes in your question, the more likely to get a good response. See the section below for more details.

Good critical comments are amazing

Positive comments are great. But we love good critical comments and even more.

You should not believe everything you read online, not even when it claims to be based on science, not even if it’s posted by a PhD. Good critical comments often result in really interesting discussions that make the comments section a valuable resource for all readers. 

How to make good critical comments? It’s quite simple: if your post took considerable effort to explain itself, it probably is valuable.

If you post: “This post is nonsense”, you’ve added zero value, but just unnecessary negativity. Someone would first have to ask you to explain your post before anything good can from it. Negative posts do not make you look smarter than the researchers, they make you look disrespectful and inarticulate.

It’s your right to express your opinion online, even if it’s negative. But your freedom of speech does not mean that others have to acknowledge your opinion. Negative comments are likely to be ignored, often removed, and may even end up getting you blocked. There is nothing to gain with them.

Instead, what if you post something like this: 

“Interesting post. It makes a lot of sense to me that fat loss is the same when calories are matched between a processed-food diet and a whole-food diet, as energy deficit is what determines fat loss. I understand that the study matched calories between both diets to see if there was a metabolic difference between the diets. However, I think it’s also interesting to wonder what would happen if both diets were ad-libitum (subjects are allowed to eat as much as they want). Because whole-food diets may be more satiating than processed food diets, resulting in less calories consumed and a bigger caloric deficit, and thereby improve fat loss. So, while I agree that a whole-food diet has no metabolic advantage, it may have a satiety advantage that is beneficial for fat loss. What do you think?”

That comment is GOLD.

It displays critical thinking, effort, respect, and adds values.  It doesn’t attack the study, it acknowledges its findings. But it adds the critical comment that the study was done in a certain way. The study answers a specific research question, but does not provide answers to all dieting questions (no study could ever do that).

The comment describes what information the study could not provide and speculates what the results would be if the study was done slightly differently. It ends by asking others what they think. A comment like that would definitely lead to a fun discussion and is highly appreciated!

Speak your mind!

Whether it’s dropping positive vibes, taking part in Q&A, or in-dept critical discussion, we hope to talk to you in the comments!