busybee fluffy rambles

You might have noticed that I’ve made a slight change to the comments on this site: the comment threads are only visible to those who are signed in. This is a temporary experiment just to see if it cuts out the spam I’ve been getting and also if it increases the quality of what comments do come in.

I’ve been thinking about how I can go about improving comments in general, in ways which would also satisfy some of my other general long-term plans around Publ.

Lately I’ve been getting a bunch of attempted spam comments on random blog entries. Okay, nothing unusual about that, right?

Well, it’s a little unusual in that I use isso, an obscure comment system that requires Javascript to work, so at the very least there’s some sort of browser-based automation, if not outright sweatshop laboring happening.

But today I just got the weirdest fucking spam comment ever. Not weird because of the content (it was for a list of dental clinics in India, which I guess is pretty weird), but because of where it was posted:

On an entry that requires login.

So, a little while ago I did an extremely unscientific poll on login methods via Authl on this website. The results of that (measured by folks who accessed my site for any authenticated reason, not just folks visiting the login method poll):

• 8 signed in via Fediverse (Mastodon/Pleroma/etc.)
• 4 signed in via IndieAuth
• 7 signed in via email

Not a single one signed in via Twitter.

The other day I discovered that my site is banned in the UAE on the basis of “pornography.” The national filter criteria are pretty fascinating, and now I am on a mission to get banned for as many categories as I can with a single blog post! So, here we go.

My week off from work felt great. But I’m still having difficulty actually focusing at work. I have a bunch of paths of exploration to examine but none of them feel, y'know, right right now.

Meanwhile, my house continues to be a bit more work than I expected. On the plus side, I’ve successfully murdered my lawn and vastly improved my garden and started up my nice meadow. On the minus side, my heating bill is through the roof (literally) and I’ve been getting bids for finally improving the house insulation. So far I’ve had three bids which went thusly:

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the differences between self-hosted vs. silo spaces. One thing that really stood out to me is that in self-hosted spaces, the tendency is to allow complete control over which comments are visible, and silos almost never allow that, or if they do it’s at best an in-retrospect thing.

For example, most self-hosted blogging systems give you the ability to moderate all comments (as I do), or give easy access to deleting comments which got posted, or any number of mechanisms for curating the community.

But most silo systems don’t give you that access; you might be able to block recurring trolls, or flag a comment for third-party review (usually to no effect), but all posts are set to allow anyone (with access to the post) the ability to post anything at any time, and by default everything gets floated to everyone else.

This came especially to mind today because of this unfortunate video:

I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on what they like doing, because even if 99% of the comments are positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop creating.

I’ve seen so many creators get burned out on their communities, because even if 99% of it is positive, that 1% really gets under their skin, and they stop interacting with the community, turning it into a toxic cesspool.

I’ve seen so many creators decide to capitulate to the communities and set up a personal SubReddit that they designate other people to moderate, just to keep it contained somewhere else.

I know so many creators who are on the verge of burnout and getting really tired of the dark side of having an audience.

I’m not sure if giving people the ability to require commentary to be opt-in rather than opt-out would solve these problems, but I do know anecdotally that the random snipe-type responses I get from Twitter or Mastodon are way more annoying to me than the comments I opt not to post when submitted to my site. They’re out there and visible and I have to take extra steps to get rid of them, and it’s taken out of my hands as to whether I even can get rid of them.

I don’t think I like how webmention works.