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by cdcfa78156ae5 2826 days ago
> expanding it with social functionality like likes, reposts and comments

One of the problems I had with blog comments is spam. Blogger would queue up moderated comments and send you an email about them. The idea occurred to me that that was redundant and it would be better to cut out the middleman - you are getting email notifications about comments needing moderation, and email already had long established and much better spam filtering. Why not have people submit comments via email? That way you can also reply to people privately. This is also convenient for people who read their feeds via RSS-to-email or in newsreaders/email clients like Thunderbird and Gnus.

Another aspect of comments via email is that it is much more like a letter to the editor. Your blog posts are articles, and you can choose to update them with corrections and comments that people send in, instead of trying to manage a half-baked message board that is the standard LiveJournal/Blogger/Wordpress/Disqus comments section.

I think an easy and valuable way to get non-geeks to use web page feeds more is to provide the option to sign up for the feed via email, by offering a "newsletter" option.

1 comments

I upvoted your response as your ideas are very reasonable but as for me, I don't like e-mail for a number of reasons, both psychologically subjective and technical.

The first things the e-mail ecosystem is to do to become more adequate to the modern day world are to deprecate all the codepages but UTF-8 for any part of a message (header included), eliminate the overquoting tradition (including full text of the message the message is a response to) and introduce an efficient thread tracing mechanism instead, establish a more reasonable signature culture (i.e. people and software to stop including redundant and useless information in the bottom of every message) and make Markdown a core part of the standard (while HTML should better be deprecated).

Those are all very good ideas for email. Part of it could be dealt with in RFCs, part of it by changing default email client behavior.

I also agree that email should be a personal preference. I think that DFeed[1][2] shows how open discussion systems should be built. DFeed provides a unified discussion system that is simultaneously accessible through email, NNTP, a web interface, and Atom feeds. That would be a really nice way to offer a comment discussion system on a blog.

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/help#about [2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed