Blog Comments
Leaving comments on a post is a perennial talking point among bloggers. A good comment is often encouraging, provides valuable feedback and is also personally rewarding. However, allowing them on your site is also an invitation for assholes to talk bollocks. Setting aside the overall debate, comments per se just seem to be in decline these days. I find that people will respond to a post on Twitter, where they saw the initial link to begin with. Although this is pleasant it doesn’t leave anything permanent associated with the post. But such is the nature of social media. And of course another major stumbling block to leaving comments are the foibles of the various websites and platforms themselves. All too often a site will just ignore or reject your comment. This itself then acts as a future disincentive.
As it’s the New Year, I decided that as I read my Feedly RSS feed each morning, it would be “chummy” to leave comments and to try and reinforce that sense of community that only seems to come to the fore during writing events. Hence this morning, I left a few positive words on one website and everything worked just fine. I believe I logged in using my Twitter credentials. However, when I tried to do the same thing again on another blog, I couldn’t login and post anything. The process ground to a halt during the validation stage and after about two minutes, I got bored and moved on. It’s not the author of the blog’s fault. This just seems to be a random issue associated with some platforms. Even if you opt for a different method of logging in, such as Google or Facebook, the problem can often persist. And then if you wait for 24 hours it will work fine the next day.
This also happens on my Blog. As a host, Squarespace provide some useful functionality but this really isn’t the case with comments and “likes”. I will sometimes notice that a post has been “liked” several times but have absolutely no idea by whom. Which kind of makes the process somewhat redundant. Some folk have found leaving comments “problematic”, although I can never determine whether there’s a common factor to this. Thus, this is the current status quo. I am trying to leave more comments, something I’m usually really bad at doing but the circumstances are conspiring against me. I could leave a similar comment on the Blaugust Discord server, assuming that the author is active on that server and will see it. Not the best solution but the best I can come up with at the moment. Certainly want to maintain the positive feedback ethic, as I feel it’s needed at present.
