Everything on this website is hand-placed by me. Unless there is some kind of security vulnerability, you the reader are unable to submit anything here. No comments. No embedded content from other sites. No “webmentions” (not that I know what those really are).
Why?
I previously wrote about a script that allows me to easily update the site by pushing to a repository. This script and a simple program to generate HTML code from Markdown text combine to largely meet the needs that would otherwise be met by much more bloated systems. The additional benefit is that I get to have written this server-side static site generator myself. I much more readily trust this solution to output this website than I would any blogging engine, because I can generally understand the output.
Unless you exploit some kind of security vulnerability, you can’t put anything on this site without involving me. One of the main drivers behind this decision is the superstitions that gave rise to the Dead Internet Conspiracy Theory.
Now let me be clear: this conspiracy theory is wrong. I don’t believe it one bit. What I do believe is that content curation — whether algorithmic or otherwise — in concert with user participation create perverse incentives to reward users for continuous contribution. Put simply: the comment section is shit because we reward participation. It isn’t merely that all content on the WWW is created by bots. On sites devoted to being “social media”, everyone is pushed to always say something, regardless of if they have anything substantive to say. When you’re in this situation, everyone begins to behave like a bot would: adding random, irrelevant bullshit to the feed.
I’ll have none of that here.
Because this site is devoid of user interaction, there is only one meaningful contributor: me. Everything here (not that there’s a lot here) is in some way authored or curated by yours truly. While the downside of this is that the site isn’t very large, there isn’t much to read, everything here is something that I have found worthwhile to share to a discerning audience. There’s no recommendation algorithm shoving content in your face. I don’t even collect analytics on visitors, so “likes” or other brief interactions don’t motivate the content I put here.
It’s just me.
Victoria