My Blog's Comments Section Is Empty. My Inbox Is Full. Here's Why.

I’ve noticed something strange lately. After I publish a new article on my website, the public comments section often remains quiet. Yet, over the next few days, my private email inbox will fill up with thoughtful, personal, and often deeply moving responses to the very same piece.

My first thought was that this was a technical problem. My website is built on a platform - Ghost - that asks people to sign up for an account before they can comment. This creates friction, and in a world where our attention is the most precious commodity, any friction is a potential roadblock. The simple answer, I told myself, was that I was making it too hard for people to engage.

But the more I think about it, and the more of these heartfelt emails I receive, the more I suspect the problem isn’t technical. It’s psychological.

The Stage and the Dressing Room

Not long ago, I wrote an essay about being "homesick for an internet that no longer exists." I reminisced about the early days of online forums and chat rooms, clumsy text-based spaces where the primary goal was connection over a shared interest. The modern internet, I argued, has shifted from a platform for connection to a stage for performance. And the public comments section is now part of that stage.

In the early 2000s, leaving a comment on a blog felt like joining a conversation in a small, semi-private room. Today, leaving a comment on a website or a LinkedIn post can feel like stepping onto the stage of a global auditorium, under the full glare of the spotlights, with your real name and professional title attached. This is a phenomenon sociologists call "context collapse." The different audiences from our separate life contexts—your boss, your colleagues, your future employer, your estranged relatives—all merge into one. The pressure to present a single, consistent, polished version of ourselves becomes immense.

A casual thought that might be perfect for a conversation with a friend feels risky when it’s permanently attached to your professional identity. The stage is bigger, the lights are brighter, and the stakes feel impossibly high. And so, we self-censor. We hesitate. Or, as I am now seeing, we find a different way to connect.

A Retreat to Quieter Conversations

From a psychological perspective, I believe there are two powerful things happening here.

First, we are seeing a mass retreat into smaller, safer conversational spaces. As our public squares become more polarised and performative, people are seeking out the digital equivalent of a quiet conversation over the garden fence. They still want to connect, but they want to do so in a space where they can be unpolished, uncertain, and human, without the fear of public judgment. The invisible engagement happening in our DMs and inboxes may now be the most valuable form of engagement there is.

Second, in a world increasingly filled with soulless, AI-generated content, a private email is an "authenticity check." It is a way for a reader who has been moved by a piece of writing to reach out and confirm that there is, in fact, another human on the other side. The act of writing the email is a way of saying, "I saw something real in your work that spoke to me. Are you really there?" And the act of receiving it, and replying, completes a human-to-human loop that is becoming vanishingly rare.

A New Definition of Engagement

I have started to see this trend not as a failure of public engagement, but as a sign of a deeper, more meaningful success. The goal, for me, has never been to simply accumulate likes and comments—the vanity metrics of the performance era. The goal has always been to connect, to spark a thought, to make someone, somewhere, feel seen and understood.

These private emails are proof that this is still happening. They suggest that what people are truly seeking is not another platform to perform on, but a direct, private line to the author of an idea that resonated with them. Perhaps the future of meaningful online interaction lies not in building bigger town squares, but in tending to these smaller, quieter, and more human conversations.