I love Michael Lopp’s writing in Rands In Repose. His entry The Likeability Feedback Loop captures why I still have my RSS reader and try to comment on posts that engage me.

Social media gleefully feeds a post-truth society and it does so by design, but social media is not the problem. Fake news is not the problem. The problem is we the people taking the time to think critically.

Comments are open here because I know that while it is my great joy to understand and write about a few select topics deeply, what will make these topics honest and true is if you tell me what you think.

Bloggers tend to engage their readers, welcoming feedback, and asking for more when they fail to understand it. Not every one, but enough that it makes commenting worth the chance. They enjoy the conversations.

When WordPress Jetpack released their publicize tool to put posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google+, I almost refrained from using it. I was not sure at the time I wanted to mix my social media and blogging spheres. It fractures the conversation. The responses on those spaces do not make it back to the post, so there are five different spaces for the conversation.

Of late, Facebook also notifies me each week how many likes my content received. The most recent one was about 230-something which pleased me because it was around 140 the two weeks prior. And then I realized just how shitty it is that I valued myself over Likes. So very superficial.

The comment I left for Michael:

Blogs are harder to consume than social media. There is the challenge of discovering ones I like enough to subscribe. The constant dying of RSS readers. And the death of blogs I enjoy as the bloggers encounter life changing circumstances.

Social media is far easier. People I follow suggest things for me to read. I subscribe to essentially curators who put in front of me the things I want to read. And really I am surprised Facebook and Twitter have not gone the way of SixDegrees, Tribe, Friendster, and Myspace.