This is prompted largely by Robin Sloan’s comments on comments.

A decade ago I was active on Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinboard, and wrote a couple of comment-inviting blogs on magazine websites. Now?

• No Twitter
• No Tumblr
• Pinboard bookmarks are set to private
• I blog on my own site, and have comments disabled
• I’m on micro.blog but only post photos

What happened? In a nutshell: I simply got tired of strangers wanting to argue with me. (Also, it was moronic to be that Extremely Online. I don’t know how I got anything else done.) Twitter was, you know, Twitter. Blog comments were generally what one would expect from blog comments, occasionally useful but prone to degenerate into spats. People who followed my Tumblr would write — you couldn’t disable such on-site messaging — to chastise me for signal-boosting something I had just quote-posted. People would email similar chastisements about something I had saved on Pinboard, apparently under the assumption that a bookmark is an endorsement.

Even when I moved to micro.blog, where folks are in general extremely nice, I had to stop posting anything but photos because strangers would invariably show up wanting to argue with me about … well, anything. As though the subject doesn’t matter so much as the act of arguing. I don’t know whether such people feel that argument is a means of sharpening their ideas or whether they just want to be heard, but I keep thinking, Man, does everything have to be subject to disputation? Can I not just put something out there for people to take or leave? Even now that I am blogging without comments, I regularly get emails about my posts, and at least 90% of them are negative. It wears on you after a while. (I continue to believe in the intrinsic value of the blog garden, so the negativity isn’t keeping me away.)

The reigning assumption seems to be that every posted opinion or preference or experience or plain old link is an invitation to debate or refute — that’s what social media, to many people, fundamentally is for: debate and refutation. And as long as that is the reigning assumption, then no platform, it seems to me, can be fundamentally different than all of our other platforms. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our platforms, but in ourselves, that we are disputatious.