This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own.
Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the slipperiness of the term “AI”.
Then Jim Nielsen wrote a deliciously satirical piece in response to my pithy little parable about research.
I love it when this happens!
Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote a piece called What Made Blogging Different?:
And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through.
It’s so true. I feel like a response from someone’s own website is exponentially more valuable than a response on Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, or any other social media platform.
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the way that Brid.gy will send those social-media responses right back here to my own site in the form of webmentions. It also pings me whenever someone likes or shares a post of mine. But I’ve noticed that I’m not that interested in those anymore.
Maybe those low-investment actions were carried over from the old days of Twitter just because that’s the way things were always done, without us really asking whether they serve much purpose.
Right now I accept these likes and shares as webmentions. I display a tally of each kind of response under my posts. But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I don’t particularly care about these numbers. I’m pretty sure no one else cares either.
If I cared, then they’d be vanity metrics. As it is they’re more like zombie metrics. I should probably just put them out of their misery.
This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
Adactio: Journal | Sciencx (2025-10-26T14:43:48+00:00) Responses. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/10/26/responses/
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