In this post, Manu shares his thoughts on how he’d like to have discussions online. He says that he prefers emails: they are direct, private and take effort to write so it’s more likely that they are more valuable or in-depth compared to social media or comments.
Manu writes about the clunkiness of his current workflow:
Is this workflow ideal? I write something, you read it on the site, in your RSS reader, or in your inbox, you send me an email, I reply to you and off we go? Those are a lot of steps and there’s substantial friction involved. You need to decide to send me an email, hunt for my email address, write something, and overcome the weirdness of sending an email to a stranger.
And I kinda agree but if having few in-depth personal discussions is the goal, this clunkyness probably functions well as a filter compared to semi-meaningless comments, likes or social media comments.
One place where I disagree with him is when he says:
Another thing that matters is intentions. I recently removed from this site the integration with webmention.io to receive webmentions from other sites. Why? Well, because as much as I like and approve the idea behind the concept of a webmention I also think that taking the time matters. Taking 20 seconds to send an email to say “Hey, I wrote something and I quoted something you wrote” has a lot more value in my world than configuring a server to automatically send a ping towards my server. I know most people won’t bother doing that and that’s fine. I honestly prefer to not know, I prefer to not receive all those automated pings and live in ignorance.
I think that writing a blog post to participate in the discussion is the intention and time-consuming part and sending a Webmention, automated or manual, is similar to clicking that Send email button on your email client.
For me, that’s one of the ways I’d love to have these discussions online: by replying, quoting and referring to each other’s thoughts so that the discussion becomes available to others to read and participate in, helping us have better discussions.
Of course, a discussion that is performed in the open web between two blogs is very different in nature than an email discussion privately with friends. But if the discussion starter is a blog post, I’d love mine to create more public discussion where everyone can benefit from different ideas and perspectives than something that is stuck in our hidden email discussions.
I also send emails to people whose blog posts or other online creations have been impactful on my life as a way to say thanks if I don’t have much else to say (ie. not worth an open discussion in my blog).
What I do really agree with Manu here is this:
What I do know is that a good conversation takes time and effort. It takes willingness to engage and it takes honesty. But they’re rewarding. Good conversations are incredibly rewarding. I encourage you to try.
I’d love to have more discussions: if you want to have a discussions about anything I’ve written about, please get in touch. If you have a blog, write a reply, link to mine and let me know (email, Mastodon, Webmention, whatever). If you don’t have a blog or don’t want to have discussion publicly, email me. I’m very happy to discuss further.