People keep telling me how amazing comment threads are here, but the more people describe it the more it doesn't sound like My Thing. What I love are conversations between a few people where there is an exchange of ideas or experiences and it feels very intimate, and it's something that I really missed on tumblr.
But everyone here is like "comment threads are like hosting a dinner party or a salon, where you can hop into the kitchen to check on food and people can carry on having conversations! It's great! Join the fun!" And I'm like ... "Whenever people invite me to parties I basically reply and ask if we can do one-on-one coffee instead" and "Whenever I invite people over to my house, there's that moment about 2 hours in when I don't know what to do with the people in my house anymore and I just want to hide in my room." (Which is the feeling I was trying to capture in
Introvert Time)
But I'm also too much of an archivist to lock my entries or delete stuff or lock comments. (Oh! Just remembered to unlock the comments on
this post. There were good comments there and I didn't realize that locking it would actually hide the comments. Oops.* But it's unlocked now, yay.)
It's not that I'm anti-comments or anti-comment interactions. It's just that the thing that people describe to me as Absolutely Amazing also happens to be one of those things that I curate very heavily in my own life.
So, how do I curate it in my online life so that I don't feel overwhelmed?
One thing I've done is to filter all the comment email notifications into a separate folder so that it doesn't clutter up my inbox and I can choose when to read them.
Another thing I can do is to simply not read comment threads on posts. And that's mostly been working out for me, except (a) it's probably like not reading the tags on tumblr reblogs -- I'm basically missing out on a big chunk of the fannish interactions, and (b) it's the equivalent of being that one person who awkwardly lingers in the kitchen at the party so that they can catch the host in a one-on-one convo when they're actually busy trying to do something else.**
If I open post comments in a separate tab for later reading, I then get a bajillion tabs and forget why I opened them in the first place***, but the Memories system is too hidden for me to actually remember to check them.
What do people usually do? Is there a way to indicate that I'm flailing at you but don't expect a reply? Is there a way to indicate that I'd be really confused and chagrined if someone who's not the person I'm replying to actually showed up in the comment thread? Or are there already social norms in place that make the "butting in" a net positive experience for all involved?
Or maybe what I need to do is just direct all posts (and comments on public posts) to a wider group of potential participants than I'm used to?
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* probably mental block from that moment around 7pm that night when I was feeling happy after a day spent having good-but-intense convos with people and re-writing some of my posts to be more explicit about respecting DW privacy norms and then ... I opened my email to see if there's any work messages and found 4 emails basically telling me that I need to stop using the word reblog because they've been on tumblr longer than I have and clearly reblog means repost (and maybe I should go back to tumblr or PF if I love reblogs that much). And dammit I spend my life being the immigrant and my time at work being the-only-one-without-an-advanced-degree-and-a-woman-to-boot and it just caused a lot of EMOTIONS that I couldn't still can't deal with.
** yes that person is me in RL. I try to be helpful in the kitchen tho
*** There's that separate frustration I have, which is that when I share a link to a cool internet thing, I want to be able to "reblog" it from the original poster of that cool link, as a way of giving attribution and thanks for sharing that thing, but usually all I have is that open tab and the OP has disappeared down my Reading Page![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
