The oldest post you’ll find on this blog is from nearly sixteen years ago, although it’s technically a “recovered” post that came from a very old Blogspot account I used when I was in high school. The actual blog that people started following is probably fourteen years old, when Planet Gentoo started and I started writing about my development there. While this is nowhere as impressive as Scalzi’s, it’s still quite an achievement in 2020, when a lot of people appear to have moved to Medium posts or Twitter threads.
Sixteen years are an eternity in Internet terms, and that means the blog has gone through a number of different trends, from the silly quizzes to the first copy-and-paste list memes, from trackbacks to the anti-spam fights. But the one trend that has been steady over the past six years (or so) is the mistreatment of comments. I guess this went together with the whole trend of toxic comments increasing, and the (not wrong) adage of “don’t read the comments”, but it’s something that saddened me before, and that saddens me today.
First of all, the lack of comments feels, to me, like a lack of engagement. While I don’t quite write with the intention of pleasing others, I used to have meaningful conversations with readers of the blog in the past — whether it was about correcting my misunderstanding of things I have no experience with, or asking follow up questions that could become more blog posts for other to find.
Right now, while I know there’s a few readers of the blog out there, it feels very impersonal. A few people might reply to the Tweet that linked to the new post, and maybe one or two might leave a comment on LinkedIn, but that’s usually where the engagement ends for me, most of the time. Exception happen, including my more recent post on zero-waste, but even those are few and far between nowadays. And not completely unexpectedly, I don’t think anyone is paying attention to the blog’s Facebook page.
It’s not just the big social media aggregators, such as Reddit and Hacker News, that cause me these annoyances. Websites like Boing Boing, which Wikipedia still calls a “group blog”, or Bored Panda, and all their ilks, appear to mostly be gathering posts from other people and “resharing” them, nowadays. On the bright side of the spectrum, some of these sites at least appear to add their own commentary on the original content, but in many other cases I have seen them reposting the “eye catchy” part of the original content (photo, diagram, infographic, video) without the detailed explanations, and sometimes making it hard to even find the original credit.
You can imagine that it is not a complete coincidence that I’m complaining about this after having had to write a full-on commentary due to Boing Boing using extremely alarmist tones around a piece of news that, in my view, barely should have been notable. Somehow it seems news around diabetes and glucometers have this effect on people — you may remember I was already annoyed when Hackaday was tipped about my project, and decided to bundle it with an (unsafe!) do-it-yourself glucometer project that got the most of the comments on their own post.
I guess this ends up sounding a lot like an old man shouting at clouds — but I also still think that discussing ideas, posts, opinions with the creators are worth doing, particularly if the creators have the open mind of listening to critique of their mistakes — and, most importantly, the “capacitance” to send abuse away quickly. Because yeah, comments became toxic a long time ago, and I can’t blame those who prefer not to even bother with comments in the first place, despite disliking it myself.
To conclude, if you have anything to discuss or suggest me, please do get in touch. It’s actually a good feeling to know that people care.