There are no comments on sapphirepaw.org, and not only because of the basic CMS underlying it. It is an intentional choice.
It seems like almost every single system goes through the same evolution:
- Open to all
- (abuse happens)
- Moderation, blocking, and deletion become possible
We saw it with Discord, with YikYak, with trackbacks/pingbacks, with comments, with email, with forums, and with many before. Everyone has to fall in the pit before they believe it is there. (The exception is when someone buys the platform and thinks the pit is a feature, rather than a danger.)
The problem with offering comments here is that step 3 isn’t passive. Moderation and blocking require ongoing maintenance. Outsourcing this to a centralized system has all the usual downsides of centralization, while going against the indie-retro feel I am cultivating. Pulling in an open-source package has fewer downsides, but relies on the project keeping ahead of spammers looking to exploit installations. The comment spam—exceeding 97.5% even after deploying customized countermeasures—is why I closed down my Serendipity-powered blog.
This isn’t to say that those are the only options. I have seen a few alternative comment systems in the wild:
- Comments are not published until the comment period closes. Thus, all comments are directly about the post.
- Comments are never published; the blog author makes occasional “reader feedback” posts, or permits readers to include their email for private communication.
- Comments are directed to a separate page, somewhere off-post and maybe off-domain, where people like me never bother to read them.
(There’s also “the blogger replaces abusive comments with their own meme” but that is probably more work than regular moderation. Besides, “bullying but a Nice Guy™ does it” is still bullying, and still reactive. Both are things to avoid.)
Unfortunately, I don’t feel like making one of these systems, and I don’t really expect that it would bring in anything but desperate attempts to spam. There are a lot of spam posting scripts that don’t really care if they are successful. Checking success rates would slow down raw posting speeds, and lower the “number of thing spammed 📈” on the dashboards.
I also don’t want Google trying to submit things just to see if it’s a search form. That is, if they still do that, in their post-AI “wrong answers only” era.
I suppose, we also must contend with AI generated posts, which I desire even less. Nothing is more annoying than finding a reddit advice thread that is infested with mindless copypasta from the fashionable bots of the day. Who cares what someone hypnotized by their toys has to say?
One last reason to distance myself from comments is to distance myself from gamifying every aspect of my life. If there were comments, I would start to want to get comments more than I would want to make authentic posts. I would be thinking about the boundaries of “what would people want?” and not the 🌤️open fields🌾 of “what do I want my website to say?”
The answer to that last part, apparently, is “this.”