Where Are My Posts?

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Infolets has a smart comment system that shows you all the posts by a contributor. Yet, the only place where I saw it on their site was while previewing my own comment. It relies on their search engine. Metafilter has it too, I’d like to see it elsewhere, if only to keep track of my own posts. Deja did it for Usenet, now how do you build a unique data perspective on people, when comments are spread around dozens of web forums? You might want to avoid such an easy way to expose everything you said though!

2016 necro-update:  for a while FriendFeed did this, then Facebook bought them in 2009 and eventually killed them in 2015. A bunch of social media aggregators came and went in past years, but did anyone really gain real traction? What if I don’t want to move to Medium or LinkedIn? It’s hard not to give up on the open, independent web at this point. This June 2016 article from the Atlantic about Evan Williams is very relevant:

“The open web’s terminal illness is not a story that he alone is telling. It is the common wisdom of the moment, espoused by Times columnists and longtime tech bloggers. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future. Since so many of these social networks are operated by algorithms, whose machinations are proprietary knowledge, they worry that people are losing any control over what they see when they log on. The once-polyphonic blogosphere, they say, will turn into the web of mass-manufactured schlock.”

See also Anil Dash’s lost infrastructure of social media:

More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have faded away and been forgotten, but new incarnations of these features could still be valuable.

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