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by Jay Cuthrell
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Yeah. I turned off comments.

You see, I was a participating fan of them for many years. I was prolific. I commented anywhere and everywhere I could. I watched as comment forms evolved, expanded, rose, fall, soared, and failed.

In the history of my own blog experiments there were times when I would test out comment systems. Often, these were enhancements to Wordpress comments.  Over time the shift to a stand alone commenting environment occurred when companies like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, and pre-pivot versions of Echo made it possible to move the conversation to just about anywhere.

The so-called NASCAR problem of how to maintain the pseudo-non-repudiation side of things was always interesting. It started with Gravatar essentially grabbing the email address namespace as an anchor for identity. This was in stark contrast to the early hacked up Wordpress sites that become popular (see also code frozen lumbering teetering beasts prone to outages) where you could type anything that would fit in a web form text field. This ended with Facebook entering into the comments arena. Facebook comments kinda make me weep for humanity in general. Yahoo is there too but not as much so maybe I’ll look back one day and Yahoo will have fixed all that Facebook has done wrong.

So after a few more test runs and a review of the total comments ever received (no, I’m not ignoring comment spam uh… innovations) here on my own blog I decided that it was just silly to keep up with comments. In fact, I’ve even removed sharing options as of this post. I just don’t care about the social impact when there are many other ways to have it tracked and I am the one that has the web server logs (for now).

Does this mean I’m moving from my current Linode DIY environment to something Tumblr-esque like I did when I moved from my own colo box to something in the public IaaS cloud? Well, not exactly now I guess. Maybe? Sure. I’m always curious to try something new to me even if others have been doing it only that way ever.

There are folk that have never touched installation media. There are folks that have never connected or even put hardware together for their personal publishing desires. Does that make me a relic? Hardly.

Maybe I’m interested in what might pass for PaaS to enable what I once considered in my post regarding Evernote a while back — and that’s what I’d call a growing option. Never having to run OS updates again has a certain appeal.

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