I think that's important. I feel no one should expect that people leave comments; some people are just more chatty than others. Your blog, Amoretti, is slightly different than most other blogs though, because you usually encourage discussion instead of just sharing your experiences, which makes your blog stand out, so I can see why you would "expect" people to leave comments.
I never participated in the "photo journal chats" and I'm still not participating in threads with no topic other then "[insert generic compliment here]" - guess that comes because I'm a "old" (applying to actual time spent in the internet, not age, lol) forum user and was already around when the newsgroups and slooooow modems existed, so maybe I went through a harder school concerning netiquette than others.
The comments have made it easier for me to just drop a short line about something, something I'd never do in the forums itself. Still, I'm a rather quiet one - and if I have access to your journal, you can bet quite a lot that I'm lurking in it even though I never comment. I really like the comments feature, because with the old journals, I would frequently read something and wanted to add something to it, but always felt that it wasn't worth the hassle of writing a PM, so I hardly every said anything. With the comments, it's easier, so I'm slowly getting better at commenting.
Wintersun - I can understand. However, you should know that it is optional to enable the comment feature. Someone who did not want to receive comments could simply disable the feature for their blog, or enable/disable it for single blog entries. For someone who has the commenting feature enabled, it's very likely that s/he is happy to receive comments.
On the other hand, new members should not feel left out just because they're not "granted" access to everything right away - with the private blogs, it's just as with the other privileges one can gain here, there just is no set rule when you can gain them. But you can, no worries. It's just that we're quite cautious by habit and experience taught most of us that we're cautious for good reasons. I know that LHC is an unusual place in the Internet in that regard - almost all people are so naive when it comes to safety in the Internet that they don't realize that the boundaries and privileges LHC sets are there for good reasons. I think it is good that LHC teaches us caution every day.
I don't feel like the contact feature itself is sneaky - I have added some contacts, mostly because I felt that the persons I was adding didn't want someone to "intrude" their privacy with a friends request. I wanted to grant those people access to my blog because I cared about the fact that they could read it, mostly because I enjoyed their journals/blogs/posts in the past. Since my blog is private, it's quite easy to realize that I granted you access, without outright telling you. I share something without expecting to get something in return, because I feel that those persons "deserve" (now that's a strong word) that.
ETA: Now I know I worded the deserve-thingie bad... I don't want to say that other people don't deserve it. Eh. YKWIM?
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