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Comment by hsn915 | Hacker News Reader

There are two issues:

- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.

- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.

- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.

P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.

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I would counter your three assertions with a few thoughts:

- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore

- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)

- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.

The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments.

No comments are normal if no one can comment.

Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.

I removed comments not due to anxiety but to the drudgery of having to deal with ever more creative ways of spamming.

There are also tools like giscus[1] which allow comments on static pages but only for folks logged in on third party services - such as github in the case of giscus.

[1]: https://giscus.app/

> - Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.

This is not really an issue at all, more like a feature. Posts that provoke discussion or are otherwise interesting get HN discussions. Posts that don't get traction also don't require a comment field. Free moderation and signal boosting.

I'd also recommend putting an email address on the website (but not your main address). That also tends to promote high-quality engagement with readers directly.

> Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.

It's easier then ever. Shared hosting with cPanel has enabled anyone including my mother to host a website, blog or whatever.

A blog doesn't need to be an abstraction of JavaScript libraries and frameworks tucked behind Cloudflare. Just make a CRUD application and you have a blog. It yes requires knowledge but it's not hard. With LLMs now running the internet it's even easier than before.

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