I recently noticed a few effects on my blog that my interest in Project Gemini has produced.
As I have moved my writing style to something more Gemtext compatible, I’ve rediscovered the joy of writing longer pieces. For a while I was all about “keeping it short”. But these days, with Corona, and the dumbing down of everything weighing heavily on me, I’ve decided that I should return to longer texts, confusing sentence structure, eclectic words. Keeping things short and to the point, short sentences, simple words – it didn’t change a thing for the better, is my current conclusion.
Why would Gemtext encourage me to write longer texts? I’m guessing that it has to do with the lack of emphasis. I feel a lot like I’m writing a book: there’s no bold, no italic, no inline links. I just use words the emphasise things, or more words to explain an idea instead of linking to a page; I practically do not use headings within blog pages. I’m left with quotes, and lists of links. My blog has turned into a wall of text. I try to think of it as writing practice.
Perhaps it’s also my German understanding of text showing. Smash words together. Smash sentences together. Smash paragraphs together. We like the long form. Then again, when I read older English texts, I see that they also like to show off their erudition with their choice of words, the length of their sentences, the endless dance of their thoughts snaking across the page. I’m thinking of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, for example.
I often use quotes to introduce a link. The combo of quote followed by a link to the source works well for me (and also translates well to HTML).
Gemini is a new internet protocol which: is heavier than gopher; is lighter than the web; will not replace either … – Project Gemini
The other links tend get moved to the bottom of the text, like references, footnotes, bibliographies. Yeah, I know, this is not the hypertext I was promised when I discovered the web; at the same time I find that I hardly ever click all the links people embed in their pages. There’s sometimes little value and curation. Are these links because you can read more about a thing by following a link, or are these links recommended reading? If I want to recommend a link, I still need to use words.
I often leave comments to myself on my blog. I don’t think this is something I started doing because of my interest in project Gemini, but it’s something that I started doing at about the same time. It started with link pages, like that page collecting links about Trump. It was my way of dealing with the situation, and it started me down the path of using a quote and a link.
I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog, and I guess I like it that way. I don’t know if I could cope with twenty people commenting. Perhaps the anxiety would make me stop. Somehow the “like” and “boost” (share?) activities on social media work for me. No words. Just click. There is still no way to “like” a blog post, not on this blog in any case.
When I got interested in Gopher and Gemini, I noticed that many people were opposed to comments. I was taken aback. What? This is how I imagined interaction on blogs worked! But these people had seen what comments can do on newspaper articles, on YouTube videos, anywhere somebody attracts a crowd there are people who don’t bother to read at all, or don’t bother with benevolent reading, or nuance, or good manners. And you get advice like “don’t ever read the comments!” No wonder people start fearing comments. The comment section is where strangers leave their spam, their insults, and proof of their inanity. “Just use email!” they said.
Email, the preferred tool of suits? Email, the medium of bills and spam? The big password reset button of the world? But it’s true. I’ve started writing more emails. I’ve started getting more emails. Not a lot, obviously – but these one-to-one conversations have all been excellent. I recommend it. I recommend you having an email address on your site, too! Sure, you might get spam. Obfuscate it, if you must. I just got used to the 5–10 spam emails getting through the filters every day, to the about 400 spam emails in my junk folder. The benefit of writing emails to individuals, to write like you’d write a letter with a pen to an audience of one, it’s … weird, but in a good way. It’s different, if you haven’t done it in a long time.
I’m not saying you should drop the comments on your sites; just consider adding an email address to your site and tell people that writing a reply by email is OK, too. Maybe you’ll get some.
Don’t forget to check your junk folder every now and then.
And yes, I am sometimes thinking about getting rid of comment pages. 😅
2008-02-02 Keep It Short, advice I’m not following myself
2016-11-14 Trump, my first link collection with quotes, I think
Gemtext, with three heading levels, list items, quotes, and links
#Gopher #Gemini #Writing
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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not all are scared of what comments can do, but of the complexity it creates. I leave comment, I suddenly need to visit again to see a response. Solderpunk himself mentioned that a while back, how comments in gopher, Re: on posts would be enough, maybe. but comments themselves are more complex than just scary
– test 2021-08-08 22:20 UTC
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I miss the times when people actually commented on blog posts. These days people may reply on a Twitter link to a post, but comments on my posts at my actual blog are exceptionally rare these times.
– Andreas Gohr 2021-08-09 05:22 UTC
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Heh. Perhaps the RPG blog posts I see are the exception, not the rule. Here’s an example post by JB: https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2021/06/killing-gods-part-4.html
https://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2021/06/killing-gods-part-4.html
– Alex 2021-08-09 07:36 UTC
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All those links in web pages that you don’t click aren’t there for you. Other readers have different interests. And it’s interesting that rocket links had such an effect on your writing. To me they’ve been just a tool for pacing and breaking up paragraphs.
By the way: ever since I released BrutalWiki, people keep telling me they had no idea rocket links had a name. Which seems to imply they were familiar with the *concept* from somewhere. Either way, everyone seems delighted. It’s fresh!
I still see them mostly as a technical limitation. One that spurs creativity, as it often happens, and creates new means of expression, like any artistic medium should. But HTML still has value to me.
– Felix 2021-08-09 12:51 UTC
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It’s an interesting question: when was the last time I wrote HTML by hand? I need to write HTML by hand when I write templates for my web apps. There, it’s mixed with code and thus painful to do. I’ve also written HTML directly when I was starting to write small in-app help pages and the like, thinking I’d serve them directly without any processing. It was still annoying to do and I’ve often wanted to switch to POD (the Perl documentation markup), or Markdown. I guess that means HTML is now only a presentation layer for me; something I do not write by hand any more.
– Alex 2021-08-09 13:53 UTC
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As for the links… I often find myself linking to Wikipedia. Then I ask myself: was it worth the vertical space?
When I was doing inline linking, that never bothered me. It didn’t look like it was taking up any space. But these days I’m inclined to think that it still takes up “space“ – it’s just mental space.
Have you ever lost yourself in Wikipedia, looking up a thing? I looked up Berne, knowing that it wasn’t the “capital” of Switzerland. What was it? I followed the link to “Federal City“, switched over to the German page, followed the link to the discussion of why Switzerland does not have a capital city “de jure” but that the “Federal City” acts as one “de facto“. Oh, and there was the question of Jews in Berne that I wanted to look up, and the pogroms, and more… I totally lose myself in Wikipedia. The question is, I guess: is this a good thing?
It’s a morass, I think. Readers have free will, and yet affordance is a thing. If I make it easy for them to lose themselves in Wikipedia or some other site, enticing them to following two dozen links, then I’m complicit in distracting them from all the other things they might be doing instead.
I feel that free will is easier to establish if I say: here is the thing I was talking about on Wikipedia, with a link, and there are all these other things this leads to, but without links. If readers want to exert their free will and read more these things, nobody is stopping them. But I’m also not sending them on a long chase of things to read.
It sounds a bit ominous, as if I am equating spending time on Wikipedia with wasting time. I don’t think that reading Wikipedia or other good articles is a waste of time. And yet, it might not be the thing a reader wants to do.
Sometimes I find myself reading an interesting article, and it has interesting links to related articles, in newspapers, blogs, Wikipedia, and I open a bunch of tabs in the background, and start reading, perhaps I’ll start writing a blog post, and time flies, and when I finally finish my blog post and close all the tabs, hours have passed. Was it time well spent? Was it a decision consciously made or a cascade of small decisions, one thing leading to another, until I looked up and time had passed?
Anyway, I think in these days of information abundance, of the attention economy, I want to direct the attention of visitors to the things that matter. That is, I want to actively curate the links and trim the list.
Yes, other readers have different interests. I think I’d like to let them spend their time however they want, not distract and entertain them for hours. Sure, I want my words to be read, and I want to enable readers to find more info if they want to, but I don’t want to lead them down the rabbit holes. I want to treat their attention respectfully.
I still feel like I have not managed to find a good way to navigate all this. All I know is that too many links are not great.
I get the feeling that somebody I know already wrote about this somewhere.
– Alex 2021-08-10 16:08 UTC
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Ah, here are the links I was half remembering. @Sandra remembered what I was looking for.
The thing that perhaps sticks out the most is the sheer number of hyperlinks. The modern wikipedia article has nearly 30 of them within the first paragraphs of text, and it’s further surrounded by a cloud of links to the margins. – Thoughts on the linkpocalypse
I’ve written before about the plague of inline links on Wikipedia, and this is largely a continuation of that discourse looking at other design elements. – Writing for Reading
– Alex 2021-08-13 15:33 UTC
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And a follow up where the author takes a local copy of Wikipedia and removes the inline links. The result is a different reading experience.
… it really is a lot easier to read once you remove all the points of distraction. I start reading it like a book. … I find it far more apparent when I don’t fully grasp a topic. It is as though hyperlinks makes us think that information is available to us, and because of that, we estimate that we essentially already understand the topic, beacuse we could find out later. – Rendered static HTML
– Alex 2021-08-16 11:34 UTC