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There is one place where you can guarantee your information and exchange of ideas is easily seen, paying little to no money. Comments. Comments are the final

by xwdv 6y ago

There is one place where you can guarantee your information and exchange of ideas is easily seen, paying little to no money. Comments. Comments are the final frontier. Why do you think I never bother getting a personal blog website off the ground? Because the traffic it gets pales in comparison to the audience I get from writing comments. This comment for instance might be seen by several hundred people, all within my target demographic. How many people might see my longform blog content? Maybe dozens if I'm lucky. I've never really written a meaningful blog post, but I've probably written a novel's worth of comments. And because comments aren't really written for monetary gains, they are one of purest forms of writing left on the internet today. People still write comments liberally and openly, speaking their mind and even voicing unpopular opinions, because they don't give a shit about what Google thinks. Google doesn't read comments. Say the quiet parts loudly. Maybe someday there will be an age where you can be certain almost every comment you read is already bought and paid for by some corporate interest or a guerrilla advertiser, but fortunately we are still not there yet.

tartoran 6y ago
If we do nothing about it there will be a time like that with comments interspersed with ads or not being able to read a full comment without clicking some ad to unhide the rest of the comment. Im still behind adblockers but am not sure how future proof they are
ricardo81 6y ago
I get what you're saying, because you might have a lot to say about topics in comment sections where it matters and in topics you know a lot about. But there's some comment sections where you say something and it gets filtered out. What say you after this? I'm sure you're aware of shadow banning/filtering, which YouTube at least does, perhaps other large platforms. Maybe a case in point. There was a referendum in Scotland about independence from the UK. There was a very prominent blog ranked in Google regarding the question of aye/nay, but you found that the comments were moderated towards one disposition. If all the funnels point to that information source, the comments are almost useless, especially so if they're curated towards one conclusion. We're relying on a middle man (or many middle men) offering a variety of conclusions which we should reach ourselves, rather than one hand delivered to us by one or two algorithms and/or social engineering. Diversity, basically, not just in results, but opinions and conclusions.

by xwdv 6y ago

tartoran 6y ago

If we do nothing about it there will be a time like that with comments interspersed with ads or not being able to read a full comment without clicking some ad to unhide the rest of the comment. Im still behind adblockers but am not sure how future proof they are

ricardo81 6y ago

I get what you're saying, because you might have a lot to say about topics in comment sections where it matters and in topics you know a lot about. But there's some comment sections where you say something and it gets filtered out. What say you after this? I'm sure you're aware of shadow banning/filtering, which YouTube at least does, perhaps other large platforms. Maybe a case in point. There was a referendum in Scotland about independence from the UK. There was a very prominent blog ranked in Google regarding the question of aye/nay, but you found that the comments were moderated towards one disposition. If all the funnels point to that information source, the comments are almost useless, especially so if they're curated towards one conclusion. We're relying on a middle man (or many middle men) offering a variety of conclusions which we should reach ourselves, rather than one hand delivered to us by one or two algorithms and/or social engineering. Diversity, basically, not just in results, but opinions and conclusions.