burek for breakfast

After turning off comments on this blog a few years ago, the time has now come to remove all the posts containing links. The reason is again pretty much the same as it was when I decided to turn off the comments - I still live in Hamburg, Germany.

So, I've chosen to simply remove all the posts containing links. Unfortunately, that were pretty much all of them. I only left my old post up explaining why this blog allows no comments, now updated to remove all links, of course.

Over the past years, writing new blog posts here has become increasingly rare for me. Most of my 'social media activity' has long moved over to Twitter.

Unfortunately, I mostly use Twitter as a social bookmarking tool, saving and sharing links to things that I find interesting.

As a consequence, I've signed up for a service that automatically deletes my tweets after a short period of time. I'd link to it, but ...

Updated: Removed all links.

Every now and then, when a blog post of mine gets wider exposure on the Internet, I tend to get this question: Why doesn't my personal blog allow comments to be posted to entries?

The short is answer is: because I live in Hamburg, Germany.

And like some other German bloggers who deliberately don't have a facility for comments on their blogs, I don't want to have to spend any of my time pre-censoring blog comments (and dealing with the additional fallout annoyances arising out of having to do that) in order to protect myself from the potential consequences of local judicative's decisions.

The long answer is that I think that blog comments are a relic of the web's past, given that better alternatives for comments exist, and the interesting conversations have moved on there. One of them is Twitter. There is something to be said for compressing a comment into 140 chars: it seems to make it a bit harder for comments to turn into what John Gruber calls "cacophonous shouting matches". A great example of what Gruber refers to are YouTube comments - and that's why rather then spending my time screening and pre-censoring comments (see short answer above), I prefer to spend it having more interesting conversations.