I have to admit that, when I'm following a journal, I tend to look at the comments posted by others.  Quite often, I find the author's responses to those comments will provide a little more context to words and photos.

Two questions:  1) Are there other people out there like me--"lurkers" in the parlance of the cool social media kids--who read those person-to-person comments?  2)  If the answer to the first question is "YES," have you ever gone back to a couple of week's worth of comments and found a comment you have written but can't remember doing so.  Then you click on it and realize, oh yeah, NOW I remember?  That happened to me today.

If this discussion topic expands beyond answering those two questions, great.  Go for it. 

OOOOHHHH yes, fellow lurker here. I read the comments a lot, I find them interesting and often funny. Plus Bill Shaneyfelt and I are often racing to make a botanical identification (he usually wins, dang it). 

And yes, of course I forget my comment as soon as I post it.

As I recall, you ID'd several plants before Bill on my Idaho journal last year.  I was impressed.  He CLAIMED he was "gone fishing," or something like that.

I read comments but suspect that I don't notice most comments. I am terrible at interpreting simple graphical symbols such as toolbars. They are mostly unintelligible to me.

My brain is thoroughly conditioned to ignore simplified graphical symbols because I seldom comprehend their meaning. Consequently I tend to be oblivious to graphical symbols at the bottom of a photo or the bottom of a page. My brain only notices and comprehends words and real pictures.

I have to admit to also being a lurker. I am also a secret impersonator-This is really Dodie writing, half of the Grampies. Often I  will write a comment and am too lazy to note that it is NOT Steve. Consequently he often finds to his great confusion that people are  replying to something he has no recollection of ever having written, because he never did, it was ME.

Thank you, Dodie, for your response.  From now on, I will know you are the real genius behind The Grampies' posts.

I used to be the same way--like, what are those hearts and quote bubbles all about?  When I clicked on them, it was like a whole new world to me.  Now I can't help digging deeper into journals.

I always read the comments on the journals I"m following. As you noted, often there is additional content that is interesting.

Something I'm having trouble with right now, that I'm going to make a separate post about, is that I have people commenting on my current Big Mountains journal, the emails are arriving to me. But, when I click on the link to go back and reply, the comments are not there. ??? Even if I scroll through the entire page, looking for them, no comments. I've had 5-6 comments in the past two days that don't show, and I can't reply to. The only way I know they have been made is the email notification to me. 

I generally, but not always, read comments that exist as of the time I first visit a given page.  Much less often, I may read all of the comments when I revisit a journal, in the "all the comments are visible here" format, because I'll probably have missed some that came after my initial read.

And yes I do also sometimes forget what I've commented on, or what I said.

I was happy to see the missing comments problem went away on its own.  On any website, I've found that if you wait a few hours most problems tend to disappear.  When the problem doesn't go away, the old "restart computer" solution seems to work about 90% of the time.  When those things don't work, (and even if they do work) it's nice to see the administrators are there to help