I think the biggest thing holding back the development of the next generation of social networks is this pernicious belief that it is mandatory to put some sort of public comment section on everything, where anybody with a pulse (or the technical wherewithal to fake it adequately enough) can slap anything they want down next to your content. Context matters, and this has a certain inevitable effect even on the original content.
It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content, like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the original poster to host it.
If you want a social network that works that way, you are spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social networks, consider the possibility that much of your unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this is the root cause.
It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to and including making it impossible.
I completely agree. I used to have a Wordpress blog with comments enabled, and that brought me a few headaches at some point.
Later on, I moved to Pelican, which is a static generator, and below every article there's an info box that indicates that no, there's no commenting system, and lists a couple of ways someone can reach me if they wish to discuss that particular article. So far, it's working.
Suppose all those people causing you headaches got together and started a subreddit and wrote all the same comments there. Everyone who reads you either hears about your new posts that way, or they follow otherwise but still jump over to the subreddit to see what's going on. Does this state of affairs make you as unhappy as the comment section? Is it possible that your issue is really with critiques and criticism?
No, there were legal issues involved, due in part to me not running a tight a moderation as I should have, and in part due to one person completely losing his mind and suing a bunch of people, me included.
It'd actually be great if this would have happened on Reddit. I learned my lesson: do you want to comment about anything I've written? Please, do so. But not on my piece of land.
It is a tool. It has times and places. It is not mandatory, nor is it always a good thing. It is quite often a really, really bad thing. It can always be adjoined to a piece of content, like we're doing right now. It is not mandatory for the original poster to host it.
If you want a social network that works that way, you are spoiled for choice. If you are unhappy with those social networks, consider the possibility that much of your unhappiness may in fact stem from this very idea. If it seems like everywhere you go is kind of a cacophony of regression-to-the-mean discussion, insults, lowest-common-denominator... this is the root cause.
It is not a bad thing that "replying" to the creator of an RSS-based blog is exactly as hard as they choose to make it, up to and including making it impossible.