New Year and a Comment to the Comments Thread 
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First of all, Happy New Year to all of you. I feel so strange each time I have 
to write a new year's date -- this year I am starting to get myself used to it 
with this post: 20180101.txt. Hopefully this is going to be a great year -- 
we'll see about that soon, won't we.

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Yesterday (or the day before, not sure) I read a phost[0] on Jynx' phlog about 
comments and their value -- or the lack of. Previously I encountered the subject 
over at Tomasino's[1], but the references in Jynx' phost got me started to dig 
around in the topic. I followed the links and read what others had to say about.

Essentially, I share the opinion of the majority.

Because look, I know how *I* use to write commments. I read something. I have 
some initial thoughts about it. So I make a comment. And then I forget about the 
whole damn thing. I admit, I am not the kind of person who one can conversate 
with through comments. 99% percent of the times I don't bother to look back if 
someone replied to my thoughts.

It hasn't always been like this tho. In the early 2000's we had a service in 
Hungary called Freeblog. It was a - surprise - blogging platform, but also it 
was a community. I was an active member of the community, blogging a lot, 
reading a lot, commenting a lot. We had conversations lasting for *weeks*. The 
trick was that the web was much smaller, much slower and much readable back 
then.

First of all, people actually had the time to read, evaluate and comment. And 
re-visit, and start over: read the replies, evaluate them, comment on them. And 
so on. And god, I miss those times when I had the time to do that.

Second, most people haven't followed hundreds of blogs -- these were the times 
of building communities in the blogging world. Remember the link wall in the 
sidebar of basically all blogs? Exactly. Those were the ones we read and where 
we went to start conversating. And god, I miss those quality conversations.

Writing a comment was something personal back then. I knew each and everyone of 
my commenters, their profile pictures ("avatars"), their mindset, their general 
oppinion on certain topics -- even if I haven't ever met them IRL. And god, I 
miss those communities.

Over the years, I tried several blogging solutions, therefore several commenting 
systems. Wordpress.com, Disqus, login-with-whatever-social-stuff, you name it. 
And yet, I never felt that the comments we make add significant extra value to 
the post itself. My best comments (both sent and received) were always submitted 
as emails. Because it never felt like the comment, as a "medium" is suitable for 
groundbreaking thoughts.

I still have a blog on the WWW. And I don't have a comment plugin. If someone 
wants to comment badly, they'll find me on Mastodon, on Diaspora or via email.

Ironic, but I feel the old-and-almost-forgotten feelings now, as I am typing 
these very words. Jynx wrote that this gopher-ish type of commenting is time 
consuming. Yes, it is. But maybe it drives us towards quality over quantity.

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[0] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20171230.post 
[1] gopher://sdf.org/1//users/tomasino/phlog/20171218-comments