Dries Buytaert

Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote a great retrospective on early blogging. Spiers was the founding editor of Gawker, a provocative blog focused on celebrities and the media industry. She left in 2003, more than a decade before the site went bankrupt after a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan, funded by Peter Thiel.

Today, she continues to blog on her own site, and she captured the difference between the early web and social media perfectly:

I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face.

In the early days of blogging, responding to someone's post took real work. You had to write something on your own site and hope they noticed. As Spiers puts it, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you'd let them in. If a troll wanted to attack you, they had to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait. Otherwise, no one would see it.

It's a reminder that friction can be a feature, not a bug. Having to write on your own blog filtered out low-effort and low-quality responses. Social media removed that friction. That has real benefits: more voices, faster conversations, lower barriers to entry. But it also means the town square gets crowded fast, and some people come just to shout.

It's the same in real life. When I think about the best conversations I've had, they happened in someone's living room or around a dinner table, not out in a busy public square, which often feels better suited for protests and parades. It works the same way on the web, which is why I'm barely active on social media anymore.

I experienced this tension on my own blog. For years I had anonymous comments enabled. I've always believed in the two-way nature of the web, and I still do. But eventually I turned comments off. Every month I wonder if I should bring them back.

But as my blog gained traction, the quality of the comments had become uneven. There were more off-topic questions, sloppy writing, and the occasional troll. Of course, there were still great comments that led to real conversations, and those make me rethink turning comments back on. But between Drupal, Acquia, and family, I stopped having the time to moderate.

These days the thoughtful responses come by email. It takes more effort than a comment, so the people who write usually have something substantive to say. The downside is that these exchanges stay private, which can be a shame.

What I like the most about Spiers' blog post is that the early web didn't just enable better conversation. It required it. You had to say something interesting enough that someone would bookmark your URL and come back. Maybe that is the thing worth protecting: not the lack of a comments section, but the kind of friction that rewards effort.

In that spirit, I'm going to make an effort to link to more blog posts worth visiting. Consider this me knocking on Spiers' door.