SMASH THAT REPLY BUTTON

-or-

Let Content Creators Know You Appreciate Them

Created on 2019-11-27

This post was inspired by an article by rogs: https://blog.rogs.me/2019/11/27/de-google-my-life-part-5-of--tu--backups/

Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a response to the responses rogs has received on previous articles. In particular, the following point:

I’m self-hosting comments by using commento. Disquss was a bit invasive and was loading some Google scripts and other trackers I didn’t want on my page.

So first, some backstory: Just this morning, I was reading a phlog I felt compelled to reply to, but not that was gopher. You just don’t do that sort of thing there. I don’t think it’s even supported by the platform. So I did the only reasonable thing to do, and wrote a response on my gopherhole (Gopher Link). But given that I knew the owner of the phlog I was replying to would likely never see my post (After all, I’m not the highest of profile phloggers), I sent an email.

Then, I saw rogs’ post on Reddit, and the above-quoted comment. And it was right then that it occurred to me, if we want to take back the web from big business, it shouldn’t just be up to the producers, but also to the consumers. We need to take commenting back to the original social network, email.

But rdh, I hear you say, I want my comments to be public! Well, if that’s the case, do exactly what I’m doing, and write a public response on your website, and send the original author a link. You know, I also remember a time when it was not uncommon to see static HTML pages with a small section at the bottom, where the author had manually pasted responses they had received. Maybe we should bring that back, too.

If you have any responses to this idea, let me know by email! And if you’re okay with me posting those replies here, let me know that, too.

send-email.md

2019-11-27 | First published.