Important to me is that people leave longer traces online. Longer traces make it more likely others stumble across them, and follow the trail towards new conversation and interaction. In that sense the webmentions of likes and reposts, while in themselves not important, do allow others to find people who cared to respond in a tiny way to something you are reading. If you enjoy the reading you may well be interested in finding the others that enjoyed reading the same thing. So you may follow them in turn, or be on the look out for a conversation with them. Used to be I always checked every commenter on a blog post I commented on, to see if they blogged themselves and if I wanted to follow their feed. Showing the webmentions, likes and whatnot are a means of discovery.

Right now I accept these likes and shares as webmentions. I display a tally of each kind of response under my posts. But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I don’t particularly care about these numbers. I’m pretty sure no one else cares either.

Jeremy Keith