I want to take a brief break from your regularly scheduled femdom, and comment on the comments I get here.
Firstly, I appreciate every comment that gets published. I could do without the ones asking me for a date with the women in the images, or the ones asking how they can find hot dommes in their area, but they get sent to the trash anyway. If it appears as a published comment, then I appreciate the time, effort and thought it took to write.
Secondly, I read every comment I receive. The number of people who comment is a tiny tiny fraction of my total readers. Yet, if it wasn’t for those comments, I’d probably have given up posting here by now. This site functions as an outlet for my kinky thoughts and experiences, but no matter how much I love the sound of my own voice, there’s only so long I’d continue if I felt I was shouting into a void.
Finally, I try and reply to every single comment I get, even if it’s not always the very next day. I sometimes worry that by replying a few days later, it’ll be be missed and the original comment writer will assume I ignored them. That’s almost never the case. Typically I’m busy with work stuff being teased and tortured by leather clad dommes, and just didn’t get chance to sit down and write. If a new post shows up but a comment reply doesn’t, odds are it’s because I had that post already written and queued up ready to go.
So my thanks to everyone who has already commented, or will leave a comment here in future. They are all appreciated. Just as long as you’re not asking me to find you a hot domme in your area.
Here’s a shot of a pretty typical reader of my blog in the process of posting a comment. Either that, or a random picture I found that I have zero attribution for.
Back in the early to mid 2000s – the golden age of blogging – comments on blogs were how we all communicated and developed some community. I think the major social media platforms killed that, unintentionally, by allowing people to comment on essentially nothing, while informative or interesting posts just sort of sat out in the ether.
I don’t know if social media has killed it entirely, but it has definitely had a huge effect. They’ve reduced the friction to post something and but also decreased the signal to noise ratio. Not really sure where the sweet spot is. Social media – for me anyway – doesn’t really build community in the same way. And I don’t trust any of the platforms not to kick sexual content off at any time.
-paltego
I read your posts, comments, deliberations and all, and have been a total lurker from the get go. I completely get your point about the void and will enter the debate more frequently. It’s a thankless task I am sure, but I personally really appreciate your efforts. In the meantime, where is the nearest hot domme….🤣
Glad you read and enjoy the site! Always nice to hear from a longtime lurker. Thanks.
Obviously would love to see comments and thoughts if a post catches your eye, but lurking is definitely a valid option :-). Don’t want readers to think I was trying to guilt them into commenting. Just wanted to be sure those who did knew that they were appreciated, even if I didn’t reply instantly.
Thanks again,
-paltego
I can relate to this :). I love comments, and I’m also sometimes slow to respond (for me it’s mostly just ‘mood or not’. It’s a reason why I sometimes hold off on posting some things that I think are going to get a lot of thoughtful comments: Sometimes I’m just not up to responding and I don’t want my commenters to think I’m ignoring them.
@Tom: You’re right about how social media has evolved (and blogs are getting to ‘dinosaur’ stage, honestly). I get quite a few responses to blog posts on twitter now: It’s just easier for many.
A thing I’ve found is that most bloggers are now organised into meme-groups where the unspoken rules are that if you join in with a meme, you must exchange comments, and there are SO MANY MEMES. They build communities that way. This vs a ‘loose group of semi-related sex bloggers who all enjoy each other’s content and have things to say to each other’. I feel the lack, but I’m not a joiner and can’t write to prompts, so those memes really aren’t my thing.
Ferns
Yeah, I get the ‘mood or not’ thing. I can sometimes be the same way. Particularly if the comment is long and requires a more thoughtful response that a simple “Thanks”. I think your posts tend to have more content and ideas in them, which tends to lead to longer comments requiring more effort to properly respond to.
Interested to know what you mean by meme groups. I’ve probably seen it, but not quite categorized it in the same way or caught onto the dynamic. Do you have an example you could share? I know some of the chan image boards are very meme oriented, they generally seem like a swamp I never really look into them.
Maybe when I retire I’ll try and come up with a new platform that sits between social media and blogging. It feels like there should be something in that spot. I want a cross between a blog, a tumblr and twitter ideally!
-paltego
I read every post on your blog since three years ago.
I just love the way you write! 🙂
Please keep on going! 🙂
Thanks! Glad you’ve enjoyed my ramblings. Always good to get that kind of feedback. There’s no danger of me stopping anytime soon, so hope it’ll continue to be interesting to read. 🙂
-paltego
How “ brief” or is that a euphemism for “see you”
Not really sure what you mean. It was brief as in the length of that one post. That was all I meant by that.
Cheers,
-paltego
Interesting discussion. When I started out writing BDSM stories (in around 2003) it was on the old Abductor.com forum and comments were the driver to getting stories written – writing was very interactive and the direction of a tale could change significantly in the telling. In that way it was very different from conventional published fiction – and, frankly, I enjoyed that. Over the years interaction seems to have fallen. I somehow feel the audience has moved from being a participant (back then you really had to try hard to find stuff….) to being an observer. I know that I welcome comments over at my blog and while I reserve the right to take no notice of what they say, I do always try to respond.
I think forums are definitely another area where social media has sucked people away. They used to promote a sense of community, as they were each little islands with their own culture. Like you say, you had to try in those days to find stuff, so it tended to filter the audience to those who really cared. Now the uniformity of twitter and instagram breaks that down and you end up with just noise.
I guess in some ways there’s actually more interaction, since the friction to post tweets or likes is lower. But the quality of the interaction is massively reduced, and anything thoughtful gets swamped in the random comments.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
-paltego
Hi Paltego
I’ve been trying to comment on your comment on the comments, just to note that I’m with you 100% , but the blog keeps rejecting my comment. Trying a shorter one, see if this works…
Servitor
Ah, OK, so maybe I should keep the length down.
I had rather a long comment a couple of weeks back on your post about pro-domme sessions going wrong (TLDR version: no disasters, many wonderful sessions with wonderful people, 2-3 at most that I could at worst describe as ‘meh’, so everyone should give it a go). But it went ‘ffftt’and disappeared, so the world will never know. Is the blog still rejecting naughty words? Because those are almost the only sort I write.
Anyway, keep up the good work Paltego. We love you and your blog even if we have funny ways sometimes of showing it.
Servitor
Sorry about the snafu Servitor. I really hope my blog isn’t suddenly turning puritanical again and eating comments with naughty words. I spent forever tracking down and fixing that last time it happened. I’ll have to do some experiments to see if that issue has returned (possibly after a software update) or it just temporarily took against your specific comment :-(. Do let me know if it happens again.
Thanks for the abbreviated comment anyway! Glad to enjoy the blog – much as I enjoy yours. I’m not the best at commenting myself. Maybe I should make improving that a new goal.
-paltego