Once we had problems with comments

An ongoing job on this site has been to go through old comments to edit them for odd characters and give them meaningful titles. The oldest comments are back from 2005, and in the past 20 years, a lot has changed technically, and some of the oldest comments suffer because of that.

While going though them, I noticed that most are actually quite old.

I knew that already, because I follow the comments and read every single one. I also approve those from unregistered visitors and reply to most.
The number of comments coming in is very low, and it’s rare these days that anybody submits a comment at all – good or bad – and that made me do some analysis and speculations about the whole issue.

Comments per year

First I made a small routine that shows the number of comments per year, and of course that confirmed my suspicion: the latest years have been very poor when it comes to new comments,, and since 2022 the number has been one comment or less per week in average.

That’s a stark contrast to the peak – 2012 – where the number was almost 50 per week! OK, at that time the forum was active, and replies to forum threads were technically comments, but still – 50 a week compared to less than 1 ... some decline.

We also used to get a ton of spam comments, but they were pretty easy to fight. These days there are efficient methods to keep out spammers, and the site hardly sees them anymore.

No regular comments

One cause is exactly the above mentioned forum. It had an on-and-off life and was slowly abandoned by the users. Nowadays basically no one uses the GFF forum.
Also, quite a few of the comments registered in the system came from the Streamers365 site, and that was also slowing down – and of course completely stopped as a separate site in 2020 when it was merged into GFF.

At that time there were very few active commentators on the original site, and no one has commented on a Streamers365-page since it ended up here on GFF.
But even with the forum and Streamers365 out of the equation there has been a drastic fall in comment counts.
We have older articles and pages that would regularly receive comments, if nothing else then just a “Thanks, very helpful” now and then. The most commented articles would gather 30-40 even up towards a hundred for the popular ones.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

Comments then and now

Martin Joergensen

What happened?

I think social media took over. People have confined there debates, their opinions and their strutting their stuff – showing off flies, fish and beautiful landscapes – to Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, and once they are in there, there’s no getting out.

Social media is what’s known as “walled gardens”. They are lush and green, full of people, the grass is always green and soft, but once you go in there and start building a reputation and a portfolio, there’s no way out if you want to keep your activities and keep contact with other people – who are also on social media.
Also, social media is very often apps on a phone, and not a web site in the common sense. That means that technically everything is controlled, and it’s easy to keep you from wandering off into the wilderness of the open web.

Your searches, your posts, your images, your notifications – everything is kept inside the fence, and unless you are in there, it’s actually pretty difficult to find. And that goes for yourself as well as others.

To embrace or not

A lot of sites have embraced the social media fully, and have converted their profiles to being Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or the like. They may have a web site, but embeds the SoMe-content on the site in a way that means that most of the content, users and traffic goes there and not to the site itself. That includes things like comments, photos, videos and much more.
Trying to get a forum as the one here to live, or have people upload images to a gallery service is a battle against titans. No one will uses these fringe-services when the whole world is on SoMe.
I have long ago chosen not to embrace the giants, and not have content flowing to them. There are no SoMe-likes, Facebook-comments, Share on Instagram or similar functions here on GFF.
I do not want our content to be diluted and have it become a part of the tech-giants’ already gigantic network.

It’s a battle in vain, I know, and it’s not like I’m trying to fight the noble cause. That battle was lost a long time ago. Most people don’t think twice about sharing their thoughts, opinions, images and videos on the social media platforms. For many it’s actually an important part of there every day life.
I basically just ignore Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and the others, and then take the loss it might bring. Luckily there are no economic issues, so it doesn’t cost me money to do.

I’m not trying to fight the noble cause. That battle was lost a long time ago

The result

This means a declining number of visitors, which has been the case for many years anyway. Not that I really know, because I don’t count anymore. GFF is still popular, but doesn’t have anywhere near the traffic numbers that it used to have.
Than also means less interaction.

Since people have so many other – and preferred – places to interact, the need for niche sites like this isn’t there, and the chit-chat goes elsewhere.
I’m personally rarely on social media these days. I do visit Facebook and Instagram now and then, but often less than once a week. They are both annoying and full of noise and useless content selected by “the algorithm”. More than half of what I see is something I didn’t ask for. It’s a true enshitification, as Cory Doctorow so wisely has dubbed it.
I go there to contact people, and once in a while I browse a bit, but mostly I get tired of ads and short videos of no relevance within minutes, and just leave. People who expect to get a hold of me, often do so in vain on SoMe. Sorry about that!

What will I do?

Not much, actually. I’ll keep the site running and keep on filling it with relevant content.
It’s still a great experience running the site, and even though there might not be many comments, there’s still feedback in the form of mails and the reactions I get when I meet people face to face.
Running a large site as GFF doesn’t give the same street cred as it used to. In spite of having been here for more than 30 years and having thousands of “followers”, I’m not anywhere near being the influencer compared to someone who started out on Instagram a few years ago.

Years back running this site would open doors, bring in review copies of books, get companies to provide product samples and much more. That still happens now and then, but not nearly as much as it used to.
And the comments? Well, they are probably also a lost cause, and most likely won’t ever come back in the numbers they used to be.