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by blowski 1927 days ago
Cross that bridge when you get there. If nobody uses, there's no problem. If so many people are using it that it attracts spam, then the users can decide how to solve it at that point in time.
2 comments

Of course, you are both correct here.

Spam was my first thought as well. Back in the golden age of blogging, I loved getting pingbacks on my posts, but the ecosystem became flooded with spam to the point that anybody old enough to remember what pingpacks are will automatically associate them with spam. It'd be nice if this service could address this concern, which lots of people will have immediately, and it appears they do via a plugin, as mentioned in another comment.

Since this is a centralized-ish service, it'd be good if they could perhaps address this at the hub-level.

The spam problem helped kill independent blogging by driving bloggers to centralized hosting.

The great thing about MovableType, b2, and eventually WordPress was that pretty much anyone could install it on a shell account and set up a fairly sophisticated publishing system. The lousy thing about MT and WordPress was that it was fairly easy to write automated tools to spam comments and trackbacks and now your unsophisticated bloggers were trying to become DBAs and understand the nuanced differences between MyISAM and and InnoDB tables and locking and…oh…it was easier to migrate to blogger and TypePad and eventually Tumblr/Facebook.

Kicking the spam can down the road is not the only way to solve a problem, nor is it guaranteed to work.

Up front thinking and design can go a long way.