# Why I'm using email instead of comments It's been a while now that I've been wanting to write more online. Sadly, I never got past the hesitation I had when I wrote [[20220610|this note]]. More than a few months later, as I revisited this need to 'be online', I asked myself what was it about the "old internet" that I missed and I realised it was the sense of closeness/familiarity and respect that we sort of used to have. And it was that, that made me feel comfortable. So I set out to figure out how I would like to try to rebuild this sense of 'engagement' ## Observations Recalling the days of opendiary where people were quite literally emo-ing their hearts out, people would be showing care and concern to each other until somewhere along the way the sad trolls started to creep onto the internet and provoke people to increase their self-harming activities or insult/degrade them. I'm not sure what kick these trolls get out of this but I think it's something along the lines of insecure, sad people wanting to exhibit to a larger audience that they have the capability to destroy someone else's ego. So 3 elements: 1. Sad/insecure/deficient troll individual 2. Needing to mask their insecurities/deficiencies by bullying/exerting some sort of force onto someone else to fool themselves and feed their hope that they are not at the bottom of their own perceived food chain. 3. A need for their act of bullying to be seen by the wider public so reinforce the previous point ## Considerations Now, I can't stop a troll from being a troll because their lives are for them to live and whatever issues they have is their own but I can try to limit the damage they cause to me. So the questions I end up asking myself are 1. How can have a private space for conversation? Despite the thrill of having a multi-party conversation over a blog post, would it be more engaging and fruitful if conversation were 1-to-1? And where I feel that several of these 1-to-1 conversations could benefit from being a group conversation, maybe manually create a group conversation instead? Would that not feel more genuine and purposeful? 2. How can I have a lever that I can turn on and off at will? Commenting systems tend to be all or nothing - it's either on, or it's off. How can I use something that allows me to selectively decide how I wanted to deal with things? ## Decision In the end, I decided using proxy email addresses were a good way to go because 1. It takes more effort to have to power up one's email client to actually send me an email. Hopefully this means that anyone motivated enough to do it will have real comments worth reading/conversing over. And if a troll goes though all that, then I'm going to give to the person because his/her Life must be pretty rough. 2. I get to have a more private conversation with whoever that emails me 3. The evolution into group dicussions becomes more thoughtful and purposeful 4. I get to keep my actual email address more hidden 5. If a particular proxy email address were to be flooded by bots/mailers/spammers/trolls, i could just deprecate it and create a new proxy email address 6. On the email client's end, I would be able to filter (permanently or temporarily) so I determine how I consume comments 7. An added bonus of using email over, say, embedding something like Disqus is that I get to actually 'own' the comments and not be at the mercy of another 3rd party platform. So yeah, that's how I decided to use email. And that's why you'll see the footers that you do on the notes I publish. *If you have a suggestions for a better way to do this, do let me know!* // Posted: 27 October 2022 // Last modified : 31 October 2022 --- To have a conversation with me about this note, email me at [email protected]