Posted Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 at 06:14 UTC

Everything everywhere supports comments, reviews, likes, upvotes, downvotes, and quote-replies. They’re the building blocks of engagement, and isn’t engagement all that matters? Who knows what the future ever holds, but I do know in the present at least I have little interest in public commenting or feedback functionality as I build this little thing out.

The simplest reason why is technical. To add any sort of feedback functionality, whether it’s full blown commenting or a humble like counter, to a statically generated site would require adding external calls to the relevant pages. I could pretty quickly toss together a counters API with a comically small Cloudflare Worker (the wrangler config would probably dwarf the counter logic), but I’d rather eat glass than build something that mimics the TikTok clone that used to be for sharing selfies with friends. And unless I want to also build and host my own commenting service (at which point, why run this as a static site at all rather than just use WP), that means a third-party service. Someone else collecting visitor data, executing client-side javascript, and scattering adtech tracking all over the place.

The less technical reason is the time and energy it takes to be a moderator, even when done at a teeny, tiny scale of a site like this. Third party moderation cannot reliably replicate my personal values or judgments on what should stay or go in a commenting section, no matter how many dials their system might offer or how many gigawatts their models consume. Captchas, requiring account signups, keyword filters, and other one-time costs to manage a commenting feature are ineffective speedbumps in the face of today’s spam bots and address next to nothing related to trolls. Captchas are more about training inference models (and have you ever correctly picked all the squares with a motorcycle, despite presumably being quite human?), keyword filters are laughably easy to bypass unless they block everything and render the commenting functionality inert themselves, and who on this rock in space would sign up for an account to comment on a random nobody’s photo blog anyway?

Finally, and to loop it back to the incredulity over engagement for engagement’s sake, the push to structure and present all endeavors around the notion that there must be public feedback and metrics to track is no small part of why so much in so many places is so broken. I don’t have a complete and universally persuasive rhetorical framework for the position that it’s okay to simply share things themselves and not always attach public scoreboards, but I do have a disdain for it all. I’m not going to actively build my own engagement metrics-driven prison.

The only idea I might toy with is linking to a companion post on Bluesky that would act as a sanctioned comment thread for blog posts, photos, and whatever else makes it way into the taxonomy of this site. Let them worry about Section 230 and protecting users’ account security. And linking to, rather than embedding, minimizes any cross-site pollution or inadvertant/non-consensual tracking for anyone who might enjoy looking at a photo, but has no interest in telling me.

Regardless, for genuine feedback and conversations, there’s always email: feedback-x-@servernotfound.org.