The Downs as Blog

[Formendacil]

May the admins forgive me if this veers too close to off-topic, though I think I'm okay.

I was reading a blog post today (see here if interested) and part of what it is saying gave a flattering reflection to the Barrow-downs, which I thought were worth sharing with the rest of you:

Originally Posted by Jake Seliger

In online forum culture, there’s a strong bias against linking to a poster’s own blog. That bias often slides into strict rule enforcement that degrades the quality of the forum itself, because most people who regularly produce substantive writing will want their own, ideally non-transient, forum for such writing. A blog provides that and most websites don’t. That means sites like Reddit—which has an overly strong opposition to what they call “blogspam”—tend towards intellectual vacuousness.

No one here, I am sure, will think of the Barrow-downs as anything similar to Reddit--and I daresay we would all think that a good thing. Among other things, it means that we DON'T trend towards "intellectual vacuousness." Indeed, by the definition given above, the Barrow-downs is more of an "ideally non-transient, forum for such [qualitative] writing"--what he is referring to as the benefits of a blog versus a forum.

On this note, he goes on later to say:

Work I published in 2009 can, and often is, still be relevant, while I can’t even keep track of the forum posts I wrote in 2009. They’re too disparate. Blogs act as repositories.

I suspect this is the norm out there--except that I know Barrow-downers as a rule are exceptionally capable of finding posts they wrote here sometimes as much as a decade ago.

There's a lot of meat on this article, but I think I can sum up my thoughts thusly: "good job, the Downs, for being everything a forum should be and nothing it ought not." And the real distinction is that we are a forum of substance rather than a "social" platform (though we do have some strong socialisation carried on on different sites).


EDIT: I moved on to the next tab I had open, and I found this (here):

...One side is too tired or has more pressing matters (Like living, working, etc). I’m a writer and if I have strong feelings about a subject like capital punishment, I’d rather write a long blogpost to express my opinions than continue some unending Facebook thread about the topic.

An interesting take on the matter--we all know well how comments (anywhere on the Internet they exist) frequently devolve into relentless back and forth argumentation. While forums do involve this, they seem to avoid--at least on the Downs--the same kind of acerbic battle. Is this a result of a medium that is not about a "thing" that is commented on, but a first comment followed by further (equal in status) comments?