Replying to: They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Static Site
This is really a reply to a whole conversation that was going around the Blaugustosphere a few days ago, started by Naithin.
I’ve been thinking about adding comments to this blog for a while now. I do like attention , and I certainly like the idea of making it easier for people to tell me how much they like my posts :P. But I have hesitated because it’s a lot of work.
Part of the trouble is just that I like to do things myself around here rather than using a third party service (and I have certainly seen plenty of blog posts about why all the options for that have some problem or another). Implementing the comments themselves shouldn’t be too bad, but it does lead in to why I’m hesitant to start the work.
If you have comments, you also need a way to manage and moderate them. That is both a lot of work to implement, and it is ongoing work for as long as I have comments enabled.
I like the idea of a comments section, of making a space for discussion and community. But the reality is that will be a relatively small amount of what it is used for.
The reality of the internet is an unending, inexorable flow of spam. A lot of the appeal of a static site for me is being able to more easily shrug off the waves of bots, to laugh at the hackers searching for things to exploit that just aren’t there.
It’s still on my todo list; I’ll get to it eventually. But sometimes it’s hard to find the enthusiasm. I think why bother with the effort when the proportion of real comments is likely to be so low. This is a loss. How much of the internet’s potential has been drowned in the floods of spam?