I’m starting off 2024 with a bang! My beta readers community started, I looked into Webmentions and realized it was a kind of strange social media lite so didn’t want to be notified every time someone shared a post of mine on social media, let alone display that on my own site, so, instead, I’m curating longform replies to my own stuff.
I’ve never been a fan of comments. Comments fill up, eventually you have a wall of one lined opinions and thoughts from people, and I have to spend time moderating and making sure all the spam stuff is up to date, and, just, no! Sorry. Doesn’t appeal to me whatsoever.
I also never liked webmentions because, I guess I don’t really understand the point of showing replies to your posts from social media onto your own website. Once more, I haven’t found a way to make these, well, private. I have yet to find a service that turns webmentions into private emails and private RSS feeds. I just don’t get it, quite frankly.
Every time someone replies with a webmention, that’s even more data I have to prune on my website. No thank you. The less data, the better. Plus, unlike the web at large, I actually want to respect someone’s deletion requests. If someone replies with a social media post, and then that post gets deleted later, a copy is still left on my website, which is just harvesting data to me. Why in all of the name of chocolates would I want to host external social media replies on my website, since social media replies are the lowest form of engagement. Webmentions are fantastic in theory. The problem is, they don’t seem to be private, which is honestly strange to me.
I love long form content. I’m the kind of person that will watch a two hour video essay. I’m also the kind of person that will binge an entire fiction podcast just because it has one of my voice actor crushes in it.
So since We’ve established I’m strange, I thought a really cool way to let people know what others think about me is to hyperlink to almost all long form responses to my stuff on my own website. I say almost because, well, it’s my website. I get to pick and choose what content gets displayed. Then again, unless I become a cool conspiracy theory or something, I don’t believe people would make low effort long form content about little old me, unless it’s a five hour takedown video essay or something. That’ll be when I know I’ve made it, when people make five hour takedown essays about me.
Why do hyperlinks and not host the replies?
Because, like I said, unlike the web at large, I actually respect deletion requests and more. If I hyperlink something and they take it down later, fine. People change. Thoughts change. The power should be in your hands, not mine.
I’ll hyperlink all long form replies. Blog posts, podcasts, and video responses. I’m not going to hyperlink news articles about me because, well, honestly, you can get that elsewhere. These will be responses from people. Readers, fans, good and or bad.
The catch is that it has to be content on a website. If someone sends me a long email, I won’t publish it. It needs to be a link to a response on your own channel or website.
This way, it gives others a chance to see what people think about me and not the media. It will also allow people to get traffic. Everybody wins, and everybody can find dirt on me all on one page. A bit unconventional, yes, but I can guarantee you it will be well worth collecting long form replies about me.