As per request.
I’ve had a webpage of some kind or another for years and years, but it didn’t start getting personal until Shafted. Shafted was all personal… personal stories, personal reactions, and personal humor. It was there that i started out, as just a snarky commenter, and i kept it up until i was finally upgraded to a full-time poster half a year later. Crushing Krisis came along three months later, and was meant to be an escape from the editorializing and opinions of all of the other posters at Shafted. It was meant to be soley my voice, uninterrupted.
However, a year later comments began to look tempting. People always say how they wish i had comments so they could react to all of my posts on a one by one basis. It would be great, they say. Taking this all with a grain of salt, i implemented comments for a week this summer to find them sleepy and uninspiring. And then they got the axe.
Essentially, i am stubborn. I refuse to have comments that aren’t being used, because it feels like a waste of time and energy — and it’s entirely too depressing to load and reload the page to see only a litany of 0’s and 1’s linking to comments. I refuse to let comments drive what i’m writing or how i write it, consciously or unconsciously. As per my recent post, my writing is already biased by the people who are reading it. I just don’t think it would be healthy to enable that on every post, so that i can be thinking about all of the potential readers and commenters every time i say something. Finally, i don’t like their add-on nature… i don’t like feeling as though just reading my post is not enough; since i am not an avid commenter on other sites, the ones that have a heavy base of commentary tend to fly under my radar of interest since i am only concerned with their actual content.
And, honestly, the comments on most of the sites i read absolutely suck. For the most part they consist of a few quality bloggers leaving thoughtful messages that would probably be more useful as a cross-link from their own blog, and then a seemingly endless stream of facebiting first-posting people who don’t have a clue. Every so often i have a post i really want a response to, and so i use my comments script for those posts. The extremely underwhelming response to them has confirmed my initial opinion just as much as commentary on other sites does: it’s not meant to be a daily part of Crushing Krisis.
Despite all of my varied opinions on them, sometimes comments are worthwhile. So, that’s why they make an occasional appearance. There you go Shaun & Jon.