I just received a comment congratulating me on the birth of my daughter and that it must be such an exciting time. This makes wonder if people actually read entries because premature birth and death isn’t something to celebrate and be excited about. It seems much more likely that they just skimmed and latched on to one statement to comment on. This happened a lot when I was a member of Despair.nu (thanks for deleting my account while I was in the hospital by the way…).

Sites like Despair and Exentrique are good in theory. Your site is exposed to new visitors and you find new blogs to read. The problem is that members are “forced” to comment on the sites they are given. This leads to the tl;dr syndrome of the “hey nice layout” comments or the ones like the one referenced above.

The solution to this isn’t doing away with such sites completely. Instead, let’s have a site where members are sent links to 3-5 new blogs once or twice a week. Commenting is optional. In fact, if the blog doesn’t interest the member at all, it can be removed from their rotation. There will also be a directory that allows members to browse profiles to find interesting people and blogs outside of the rotation.

Would a site like this interest you? What other features would you like to see?