This post made something click for me.
Social media provides a balance of social interaction that seems to be a sort of local maximum in its trade-offs.
Forums and mailing lists and BBSs* tended to be a sort of organized chaos. You have a random subset of humanity brought together in the name of a common interest. Each of those communities had its own rules and its own moderation; this mailing list might be super lenient while this forum might be super strict. But in general, each was—or at least started out as—a roomful of strangers. Even if any friendships or other relationships form, there will always be new strangers coming in, some of them bouncing. There's a churn that maintains a certain degree of “some/most of these people are people I don't know”.
Then came blogs. Initially, these didn't necessarily have comments sections; some of them were people's .plan files made public. Then comments and trackbacks were invented, and became both ubiquitous and synonymous with blogging.
Both became rampant spam vectors. Trackbacks (the theory of which was that your blog could be notified when other blogs linked to it, and then show off the list of those inbound links as part of The Conversation) were doomed from the start. As those started getting turned off as quickly as they'd been added, comments sections fell to spam next.
Spam became a maintenance headache for every blogger: every blog post with an open comments section could collect spam that you might, at some point, have to either clean out or sift through. Multiply by your ever-growing blog post archive. Akismet and CAPTCHA helped, but not entirely (and CAPTCHA had/has accessibility downsides).
And, of course, there's no moderation because this is the open web, not a platform that employs a Trust and Safety team. You are your own blog's one and only moderator, and nobody is paying you a damn thing to do it.
So when you get the teeming hordes of Digg/Reddit/the Orange Website/Twitter charging into your comments to tell you you're wrong, have you tried installing GNU/Linux, your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries, etc., that becomes a headache. Having a blog starts to feel more like work as a result of all the weeding you have to spend time on.
On the flip side, plenty of people coming in from these platforms got so used to seeing the end of the post followed by a hundred or so incoherent wails (and/or spam) that they started using browser extensions and later ad blockers to hide the comments section in the browser. To emphasize: Even when the blog owner willingly had (or had had) a comments section, and there were comments to be read, the signal-to-noise ratio in comments on popular posts was so low that it became popular to hide all comments sections as a reader. So even non-viral blog posts that might've had a few good comments appeared to have no comments at all.
And so comments died out for real. But what was lost was The Conversation—which was genuinely a good part of blogging! There are plenty of blog posts in the depths of my archive that have upwards of half a dozen or so comments—largely the same sort of things people post as comments here today.
People missed the good comments—reading them, receiving them, posting them—and took that energy to social media instead. In fact, it was explicitly part of the “no comments” movement at the time: we all have Twitter, so let's just use Twitter for discussions.
Blogging used to have a social dynamic to it. Not just blogrolls, but comments facilitated in-place discussion and trackbacks (briefly) facilitated discussion across multiple blogs.
It doesn't anymore. Spam and abuse and brigading and virality-induced noise spikes took that away from us. I don't have a solution to that.
That's the hole that social media fills. Partly discovery, partly place for posts you've put less of yourself into**, but especially discussion in a venue that is moderated by someone else*** and more skewed toward people you know/want to hear from rather than a random selection from the whole public.
[Edited to add] And I think this is one thing so many of us will miss about Cohost. Cohost brought the good comments back. Thanks to good moderation (thank you @kaara), needing an account (with a service we all trust) to comment, and positive feedback loops of being a good place that attracted good people and mostly repelled bozos, Cohost was a place where we could publish blog posts and get comments directly on those posts, and most of the time just enjoy that.
- *I'm speaking of public ones. Obviously a closed group formed of people who already know each other is a different situation.
- ** @NireBryce suggested maybe we should reconsider this. I think it's worth thinking about.
- ***One of Mastodon's weak points is that it's brought back the eclecticity of moderation from ye olde forum days. This instance's mods are more/less proactive or more/less strict than that instance's mods, and/or they have different rules, so the mentions you get might get one reply-bozo banned but be fine with another one's instance.