A Comment on a Comment

It’s not a regular habit, but this morning I decided to weed out a few old passwords stored in 1Password. One in apparent need of updating was Disqus, where all the comments for the candler blog are hosted. So I logged in only to realize I hadn’t in many months. There were three unmoderated comments waiting for me. One moved me to write this.

For roughly the past year, I’ve kept comments off on new posts. My default is still to have comments on; I manually make the call on nearly every post to turn them off. The comments here have never really gotten out of hand as they do on other sites. I guess it just seemed like another thing I didn’t feel like managing.

The comment from this morning is making me rethink that call, and took me back to a different time on this site, and in my life.

About a month ago, “TimOB” left the comment on an eight year old post on the death of Steve Friedman, known to Philadelphia radio listeners as “Mr. Movie.” His comment is longer than my post by a hair, and a beautiful tribute to Friedman, Tim’s friend. I feel bad that I left his words in limbo for so long, but I’m glad I was finally able to get them online.

Discourse online has changed a great deal since 2009, when I started the candler blog and wrote the post on Friedman. Tim’s comment was a nice reminder about the value of sharing thoughts on a site like this. If I had written the same on a social site, it would have been gone within a month.

Thanks, Tim, not only for your kind words on Mr. Movie, but for helping me remember what writing online can be like. Leaving the comments open on this one.