18 ms·

Disqus, a dark commenting system

527 points by supz_k 6y ago

ivolimmen 6y ago
At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The internet always have been a place where most stuff is free and people got used to that. At some point after that the dark parts and ad parts of the web will reside; but I do not think it will completely disappear.
- yborg 6y ago
  That will do nothing. They will take the sub revenue and keep the current privacy monetization too. The only way to stop it is legislation.
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives. I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.
      - unicornporn 6y ago
        There's an excellent example in this very thread on how politics (i.e. democracy) can trump capital. Read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131 More on this: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnrkbeta.no%2F2019%2F12%2F18%2Fdisqus-delte-persondata-om-titalls-millioner-internettbrukere-uten-at-nettsidene-visste-om-det%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnrkbeta.no%2F2020%2F09%2F04%2Fdatatilsynet-mener-det-er-sannsynlig-at-disqus-har-brutt-personvernloven%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt...
      - bachmeier 6y ago
        > The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives. I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.
        Talanes 6y ago
        "What has happened is all that could happen" is surely not the best line of argument you have?
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS. If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive. The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.
    - orangepanda 6y ago
      > If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users Will it lose some users? Sure. Most? No. You can buy a tv costing 4 digits that happily will harvest data and show you ads.
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        First, could you name this TV set so that others don’t make the same mistake? TV prices decreased a lot over past years (50 inch 4K units go for below $500 I think), in fact I suspect that the hardware is sponsored by ad revenue in some cases. Second, context matters. Buying a TV is different from setting up a commenting system for your site. In one case you want to consume, in the other to be a service provider (you have a website, possibly generate profit from it, probably know what JavaScript is). Moreover, you are unlikely to be able to make your own TV, but you are much more likely to be able to set up your own commenting system if you can’t find a company to handle that responsibly.
    - Un1corn 6y ago
      >it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS So never? People don't read the ToS and certainly don't judge services by it. It seems people have come to accept surveillance capitalism as a fact of life
      - 6y ago
- spijdar 6y ago
  Even that may not be enough - the article mentions this, and points out that even the paid version of Disqus includes these trackers. Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and tracking, since providers can always make even more off both subscriptions and tracking...
- pfranz 6y ago
  I already think that has happened for companies and startups, but I don't think much progress at all has been made for individuals. I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening. One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or letting you cancel. How do you see the money side playing out?
  - KirillPanov 6y ago
    > Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads ... Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening. Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do. If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some hacker-magnet database, or any of that. If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do all of that. The problem isn't a business problem or a technological problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty" allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for cryptocurrencies.
    - pfranz 6y ago
      The use case I was thinking of for individuals is more like paying a nickel to read an article. I'm not really familiar with AML/KYC requirements, but I'm not sure I see the need. I would imagine most people would want a basic account so they could revisit paid content later. Any laundering would get caught looking at your business' finances (what you do with the money) or tracking crypto accounts in a more traditional manor. I've used cryptocurrencies here and there for online services (merch and digital services) and don't remember any additional scrutiny. I reasons I had in mind are the confusion and overhead of using crypto for the average person. I guess if there were some regulatory requirements in a made-up "ideal" scenario, I would see it mirroring existing banks and credit cards where your source wallet was from a "sanctioned" account to track location for local taxes and whatnot. The onus wouldn't be put on the business other than having an allowlist (by prefix or something)--but none of that exists. I would think a lot more structure an institutions would need to exist anyway to make cryptocurrencies more palatable to individuals.
- tal8d 6y ago
  I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there, despite all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying noise.
  - spicyramen 6y ago
    This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.
    - alexgmcm 6y ago
      Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it. But man, I really hate Medium.
      - geek_at 6y ago
        not true, I have started a blog and hosted it on blogspot at first but wasn't satisfied with the style in general and the lack of customization so I built my own in bootstrap + php and hosted it on a 5€/month Server. No tracking, no ads, no external libraries, no referral links, no monetization. After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc. Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down. You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading. https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at
- baxtr 6y ago
  I think this really depends on your moral compass. It’s not solely a matter of your business model. I don’t want to start paying for everything I want to read on the 50 pages I browse per week.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  While I agree that more people should be willing to pay for services, I'm less certain that it would actually make a huge difference. Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads. And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out. So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.
  - mhb 6y ago
    Just a minor quibble about the Kindle since I'm very appreciative that there is a choice of buying one with or without ads.
- codegladiator 6y ago
  > and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
  - pmyteh 6y ago
    Yes. And the 'paid so you are the customer, not the product' thing has limits. That was one of the original value propositions of cable television, but it turns out to be more profitable to get a platform monopoly and then sell ads as well as charging a fee. Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.
- dmortin 6y ago
  > At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The problem is not everyone has the means to pay for everything. E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't afford Youtube's fee.
- a_imho 6y ago
  Disagree. Imo most content is basically throwaway entertainment (especially social media) thus very interchangeable and has very little value. The internet is simply not that important.
- clairegraham 6y ago
  Commento.io is a very simple alternative that costs $10/month. We use that on downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
  - laxmin 6y ago
    It is also open source and can be easily hosted. https://gitlab.com/commento https://gitlab.com/commento
darepublic 6y ago
roll your own commenting system
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I've done it and it can be ugly. Eventually I just disabled all commenting and I'm happy with that.
- dspillett 6y ago
  That is the easy part. The faf is handling moderation. You won't need it at first but if you get any number of visitors worth counting there will be at least one loon amongst them uses your comment boxes to insult, drop in irrelevant musings for attention, hawk referrer links to products or links to try use you to game SEO, or to otherwise be an arse. And even before them you'll probably get the spam-bots, doing the above in an automated manner. Unless you actively moderate or have someone do it for you your site becomes something that presents that sort of rubbish to the rest of the Internet. If you have the time to deal with it fine, but do you really want that? One of the advantages of a centralised service like Disqus is that those services will filter a lot of that out for you. With a self-hosted solution you have to manage that yourself. I've seen some attempts at a decentralised group moderation idea but none I can mention that have survived long enough to gain any traction - none in fact that I thought were actually practical (if I can think of an easy way to game a system, you can bet anything that people who essentially game systems for living (or a regular hobby, just for shits & giggles) can too).
unicornporn 6y ago
How is this GDPR compliant? What tracking is used for EU citizens? I've seen no consent notices here in the EU.
- nannal 6y ago
  File a complaint to your local gdpr body
- SahAssar 6y ago
  It isn't, but I'm guessing their argument is that the website owner should get consent before loading their code. Of course in practice basically no one does that and they seem to be banking on that fact.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Disqus is not necessarily off the hook here. GDPR identifies several roles with different requirements (Data Processor, Data Controller)
- mmgu 6y ago
  Disqus does not track users from GDPR countries by default. My initial story in December 2019 for the Norwegian broadcaster NRK was a result of Disqus not knowing Norway had the GDPR (we are part of EEA, but not EU). Users are checked based on IP whether they come from a GDPR country. If GDPR, they will be put in private mode. A user needs to create a profile and consent to sharing for tracking to begin. Norwegian DPA opened an investigation as a result of our stories and Norwegians are now in private mode by default.
  - seanhunter 6y ago
    Fair to say this is necessary but not sufficient. GDPR covers users within GDPR countries but also European data subjects wherever they are in the world.
    - Daho0n 6y ago
unicornporn 6y ago
The one thing you can't do as a developer in 2021 is claim innocence while you're letting these companies feast on your visitors data. You do know how these things work and you're assisting surveillance capitalism. You are complicit in your silent embedding of these tracking devices.
andrewflnr 6y ago
What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento (https://github.com/adtac/commento https://github.com/adtac/commento) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.
- input_sh 6y ago
  I've seen some examples in which people embed Discourse discussions. There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.
  - wyattjoh 6y ago
    Lead developer at Coral here (so some experience :P) Coral is more suited typically to larger organizations trying to power multi-site community tools. It has a powerful moderation system that's all open source! It's probably overkill for a static blog or small site.
- andreareina 6y ago
  I helped someone set up discourse[1] a long time ago, don't know how it stands up these days; it's got basically zero presence in the parts of the web I'm around. [1] https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Discourse is quite popular, I see it regularly on new sites. Though it doesn't really fit the same niche as disqus.
    - CarVac 6y ago
      I've seen it used to operate as footer comments on blogs.
outsomnia 6y ago
Article only makes it clear at the end that it is an ad for author's "privacy first" competitor... which is a paid-for product.
- scubbo 6y ago
  And? The article _starts_ with the point that "if the product is free, you are the product". Shouldn't we therefore _prefer_ a paid-for model, which must demonstrate its value in competition with similar competitors (for instance, by protecting privacy better?) Not all free markets are bad (though many are, and many are less free than they appear). A good free product is good, but I would rather a good not-free one than a bad free one.
  - outsomnia 6y ago
    > And? ... and I won't read these fake advertorials if I don't get cheated into reading them by witholding the admission about what they are until the end. I don't want to be lectured about Dark Patterns by a guy who deliberately misled me as his first and only interaction with me.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      I agree. It is frustrating because it is otherwise a good article and likely accurate.
    - ymolodtsov 6y ago
      It's like that Social Dilemma movie which is 100% based on the tactics of fear and engagement generation it ascribes to social network.
  - ymolodtsov 6y ago
    By they way, you're not paying for Hacker News the last time I checked. "If the product is free you're the product" is such a blatant statement people throw around like they don't have to prove their point anymore.
somedude895 6y ago
> ib.adnxs.com - Malware site, "Adnxs appeared as the eighth-biggest name in our Tracking the Trackers data This is AppNexus, the second-biggest display ad broker after Google. It can be argued that both Google and AppNexus facilitate the spreading of malware by injecting ads which sometimes aren't properly vetted, but simply calling it a malware site is very misleading.
- bzb6 6y ago
  A contrarian blog post lying to get its point across? Now that couldn’t be.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  "aren't properly vetted" Malware distribution by negligence and "malware site" are a hairs breadth apart on my scale, especially when it's negligence on behalf of an ad-broker. That kind of negligence is what gives their entire industry a bad name. But then I consider trackers as malware anyway, as is my personal bias.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
I've been around long enough to have seen how comments on the Web emerged from innocuous guest books and a feature in personal blogging and ended up being un-ironically slapped to any 5-line piece of content. Disqus and their ilk exist because of one reason only: convenience. (a) You don't need to install software and a database to store comments, (b) you don't need to maintain that software or worry that it's an attack vector (c) you don't need to pay for hosting and (d) you don't need to worry about comment spam. While that's all valid, I feel a moral question lurks beneath the surface. If you host a website, you are establishing a bond of trust with visitors. And your visitors can and will hold you accountable for the experience you offer. A foundational principle and the promise of the Web was (and still is) that information is shared in an equitable fashion. That doesn't mean you have to serve content for free or peanuts (there's nothing wrong with paid content). It does mean that no matter what you do, you can never outsource responsibility over what you put on line. This pertains both to functionality as well as the content itself. Companies like Disqus have jumped into a niche: removing the costs (time / money) of self-hosting and managing comments. It's totally fine to pull their infrastructure into your own website via - ultimately - an <iframe> tag. But you do have a responsibility towards your visitors to do your due diligence and assert that the services you're relying on won't compromise your own bond of trust with your visitors. Asserting that due diligence is a big issue. Not everyone is doing this, and enough companies and individuals will shirk their responsibility for the sake of convenience and costs. Over the past 15 years, the Web has become riddled with embeds, widgets and iframes. It's not just Disqus, it's literally any copy-and-paste code which people add in matter-of-factly without considering the consequences. WordPress, for instance, offers oembed support out of the box. Drop in a YouTube or Instagram link and it will automagically transform into a widget. Extremely convenient, but it's an open door for trackers. https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/ https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/ This leaves you, as a visitor of websites, in a bind: you can't trust websites to not have a tracker In the EU, that's where the GDPR does make a difference. If you want to be compliant, you will need to either jump through several technical hoops to give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of trackers... or you simply stop relying on third-party embeds all together since they now pose a legal liability. In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment box on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you provide them with insights in how you manage their comments. The GDPR is actively enforced and companies and individuals do get fined for not adhering to the rules. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights
atomicson 6y ago
We forget, the main reason we post a comment is to be read by others. So there's nothing wrong because it is "you" wrote the comments and it is "you". Sure you already read their Terms of Service (ToS) before embedding their product in your website. There is no free lunch as there are some costs to develop and maintain a product. If you are a coder, develop your own commenting system is not hard. They just do what they do for survival, like everybody else.
blackcats 6y ago
This is why I dropped disqus and made my own comment system https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/ https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/
throw14082020 6y ago
The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced. I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.
- spinningslate 6y ago
  I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue - so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive. On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us? A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!". "Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy invasion and refuse to pay for stuff. [0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-update-impacts-small-business-ads https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-...
  - hobofan 6y ago
    I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle. I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts. I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.
pawurb 6y ago
I've stopped using Disqus on my blog for exactly the reasons described. I've switched to https://commento.io/ https://commento.io/ and the site started loading noticably faster.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Every time I see Disqus on a site I wonder why people use it. The page load lag alone is bad enough.
  - darekkay 6y ago
    It's free, easy to integrate, many people already have an account. Those were the reasons for me. But in the end, the drawbacks were enough for me to remove Disqus.
matgillard 6y ago
"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  If you are paying for it, you are the customer, and you're still being sold. From the article: > When you provide a free product, money should come from somewhere. Disqus uses advertising for that. Now, I subscribed to a paid plan trial of Disqus to see if things change or not. No! Even in the paid plans, the same pixels are loaded on the client-side.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Where are all the defenders claiming this is all necessary and great because it enables superior advertising? Whenever we have a Google or Facebook they always seem to crawl out of the woodwork, no love for the small businesses which rely on advertising here?
marcjensen 6y ago
> Obviously, advertising companies do everything to increase their revenue. It's bit naive. Every company exists to increase their revenue.
throw8932894 6y ago
Is there a way to use github for commenting system? I have a site hosted on github, most users are devs...
- ohduran 6y ago
  utterances! https://github.com/utterance/utterances https://github.com/utterance/utterances
- kidscancode 6y ago
  I've just switched from using Disqus to this type of setup. I create a GH issue for each post, and then pull comments using the Github API. This article has a great overview of how it can work: http://donw.io/post/github-comments/ http://donw.io/post/github-comments/
polevaultweb 6y ago
I'm using ReplyBox on all my sites and client sites, it's a lightweight and slick alternative https://getreplybox.com/ https://getreplybox.com/
h_anna_h 6y ago
I have (had) a Disqus account that I connected to via my google account. I say had because I haven't been able to login in a year or so via firefox. I just get a page that says "There was an error submitting the form. If you're having difficulty, try repeating the action on https://disqus.com https://disqus.com" with an annoying meme gift on the background. Luckily the title of the page says "Embed: CSRF verification failed (403)" but I have not been able to find a way to fix it. Oh well, I guess I won't be commenting on any site with disqus anytime soon. I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments.
- loop22 6y ago
  > I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments. IIRC the Dissenter extension was just that, albeit centralized.
  - vvatermelone 6y ago
    There's an extension called Epiverse that does something similar. It used to have its own comment sections like Dissenter, but has since shifted to just showing discussions on reddit/HN that point to the webpage you're currently on. It's actually how I discovered HN.
- type0 6y ago
  > I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments. Not exactly for comments, but look at https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is it is for collaborative note taking
- criddell 6y ago
  I also have a Disqus account and at some point it got flagged (incorrectly) for spam. I've emailed them and asked in their forums for it to be fixed but apparently it isn't something they will fix.
darekkay 6y ago
I've started collecting different ways to include blog comments a few years ago [1]. After using Disqus for several years, I've removed the comments on my blog and link to social networks instead (mostly Twitter and Mastodon). [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
- joveian 6y ago
  Nice list, thanks. The one other possibility that I personally like but is out of fasion these days is the mailing list. A private archive mailing list with moderate first comment seems like it should be fairly easy to maintain, although I haven't actually tried yet. This would best be combined with the manual method you mention and would likely mostly work when there is something beyond the blog itself drawing people to be interested in the discussion (or maybe sufficienly popular blogs it could work anyway). The benefits of that method as I see it are: discussion can more easily go beyond particular blog posts, the website can potentially be fully static, and (sometimes an advantage, sometimes disadvantage) only the more interested people (in either the blog or community depending on how it is described) will bother subscribing. Also, it makes it possible (once you have subscribers at least) to first write posts to the list and get some comments before revealing it to the world. The main disadvantage I see for someone who otherwise finds the other tradeoffs ok is that people are understandibly more reluctant to reveal their email these days and many people don't have a basic conception of what a discussion mailing list is so it would be a good idea to have a general FAQ that describes the basics and links to some free email providers.
paulcarroty 6y ago
Alternatives from my notes (never used them IRL): * https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman * https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack
- mradmin 6y ago
  Staticman is awesome for static websites! (next.js, jekyll etc). It provides user content via pull requests. That's all it does! This means you have complete control over the UI. No loading of 3rd party scripts etc. I wrote a blog post about integrating it into Next.js: https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-nextjs https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-...
AntiImperialist 6y ago
True about if something is free, you are the product. Like this article made available for free written by a competitor to disqus.
xfz 6y ago
Title should probably have [Advert] prefix or something. That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did. The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).
- dmos62 6y ago
  Spotify relies on monopolizing your listening data. You should avoid it on the same premise. Delivering music is easy; their unique offering is the recommendation engine. There's no competition because there's no open listening data. If we could make it open, then you could have actual competition in the space (coincidentlly Spotify recommendations aren't great at the moment).
  - hnra 6y ago
    Does any other service deliver music and podcasts at a much lower price then?
    - sofixa 6y ago
      Plenty of alternatives exist - YouTube Premium ( which also gets you YouTube with no adds, on top of YouTube Music), Amazon Music, Apple Music, and iirc pandora, SoundCloud? I haven't compared prices.
      - airstrike 6y ago
        Can't really suggest YT as an alternative to a monopoly
        throwaways885 6y ago
        Is either company a monopoly in "music streaming" if they're both viable alternatives?
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Once, a number of years ago (Disqus has been around a while), I signed up for a Disqus account. As part of the process, the service showed me a page of comments from around the Web, and asked if they were mine, and, if so, would I like to associate them with the account. I was horrified. They included some...rather “rash” comments that I had made, over the years (I was not always the stuffy boomer that I am now). Many were quite old, and, I had thought, made anonymously. I scragged the process immediately, and made a vow to be a good boy, from then on (I had already made that choice, years earlier, but this solidified it). Nowadays, I deliberately associate myself with my online comments. I nuked my last anonymous account years ago. It is my opinion that anonymity is an illusion, these days. I feel that knowing my words can come back to haunt me, helps me to be more careful in what I say; just like in real life.
m000 6y ago
FWIW, pi.hole with the default blacklist of domains blocks all but one of the listed tracker domains. Disqus still works with those domains blocked.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 6y ago
This is so stupid, by the way. Can’t Disqus simply use its OWN third party cookie in the back end to inform all these other sites and grab their information to display, even cache some of it? Disqus is being sloppy and just angering its own “customers” is the websites and users.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  I've seen suggested before that third-party tracking is used to validate results and prevent self-dealing and fraud. When your primary function is counting things, trusting the tallymen is critical. Multiple independent counts addresses this. How true this is I don't know. Dispensing with the counting avoids this need.
101008 6y ago
Is there a good alternative that it is easy to migrate to from Disqus? I dont want to lose all the comments that I had on my blog.
- beastman82 6y ago
  This guy is selling exactly that
  - 101008 6y ago
    But it isn't free :-D
- foxhop 6y ago
  I can help you migrate your comments into Remarkbox (founder). I used to be able to import users but they stopped exporting email addresses from the disqus XML. So instead I import user surrogates. Reach out directly, Remarkbox is free now!
eliben 6y ago
Turned off Disqus on my blog a couple of years ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...) and have been generally happy since then.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I also recently turned it off. I had gotten a couple of comments in the past but my blog is quite low-traffic. Mostly a place for me to practice writing (and occasionally vent). However I did like the simplicity of Disqus. I tried looking around for something similar with the following requirements: - No third party code on my domain. - Minimal code to write myself. Most of these tools work using an iframe, so the code that they run on your domain is minimal but they end up loading as a script that injects the iframe. AFAICT the primary reason for this is is so that they can adjust the height of the iframe automatically. In some cases I could pull a pinned version of that API from NPM or similar however it would be nice if there was a truly minimal snippet that I could use. It also makes me wonder, if iframes could have a dynamic height would this ecosystem flourish? In the end I just added links at the bottom of each post to search for mentions on Reddit/Twitter and another link to share the post there. I then use a WebMentions bridge to collect responses. Right now I haven't published the code that displays WebMentions automatically but I might do that in the future.
jonnycomputer 6y ago
I miss the golden age of blogs, bulletin boards, and of mailing lists, frankly. They are still out there, of course, but focus seems to have shifted. Twitter is so much more immediate, and I think it has displaced blog post consumption. To our detriment in many ways.
jwr 6y ago
This is so amusing to me — I remember when Disqus was being built and beginning to gain traction, lofty ideas of "comments and discussions done right" were being thrown around. I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a third party, becoming tied to them and all the data tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future. Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-) Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or Google+, remember that?).
tyingq 6y ago
I wonder if anyone has considered using Gmail or another free email provider to be their comment backer. You get an API that already supports threading.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Someone sends a very bad link (eg CP) and all of your google accounts get nuked immediately without any chance of appeal.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    Yup. Be vary careful with your big tech accounts. They may be revoked without any path to resolution.
- yabones 6y ago
  There was a post here a couple weeks ago about using Mastodon (ActivityPub) to add a comment feed to a static site. Seems like an interesting idea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
foxhop 6y ago
If you are looking for a free hosted comment system, check out Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com I'm the founder and in 2021, the service is now Free for all to use. Check out my reasons for opening up the service to all here: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.... Big Tech must NOT have a monopoly on moderation!
- foolinaround 6y ago
  how do you generate revenue to sustain this service?
chrisMyzel 6y ago
"disqusting" - thanks for the article!
carlbordum 6y ago
Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels. This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to us on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/, https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments
- johs 6y ago
  why not activatypub
- searchableguy 6y ago
  That's pretty interesting. I will check it out. Thanks for sharing. :D
- seanyesmunt 6y ago
  When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing Detection" message. > This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
- vlmutolo 6y ago
  I think using Matrix for this is absolutely the right way to go. Does cactus conform to the threading specification? I was planning on eventually trying this myself, but felt like I should wait until the threading MSC stabilized.
  - bashbjorn 6y ago
    Aforementionend friend and Cactus Comments dev here. We don't support any sort of threading yet, although Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are a higher priority right now. We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.
CA0DA 6y ago
From a month ago: "Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
aww_dang 6y ago
There are some interesting features in Disqus's "import comments" feature. Most of the fun has been closed. But yeah, for vanilla purposes the criticism is deserved.
learyjk 6y ago
Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's functionality by directing users who had made comments to really shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/ https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/ I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!
- elliekelly 6y ago
  This is not even remotely related to your comment but wow your bolognese looks incredible.
  - learyjk 6y ago
    lmao I will continue to share anything I can build a meat mountain with! Analytics for my site on 5FEB showed 200 people visited my Disqus post and then 50 people clicked on the "Food" tag. Apparently people who consume tech news also like food a lot. Thanks HN.
rendall 6y ago
I've been building a commenting system called Simple Comment that leverages free-tier offerings for hosting and data. So, you own it, hosting and data. It's at MVP status now, but it's as-yet pretty rough. You're welcome to try it out. I'd love feedback. https://simple-comment.netlify.app/ https://simple-comment.netlify.app/ Heck, be the first to leave a comment! It has one customer so far: my blog. https://blog.rendall.dev https://blog.rendall.dev
grishka 6y ago
> consider migrating from Disqus to a privacy-first commenting system. One such service is Hyvor Talk I see blocked requests to doubleclick.net, which is a Google advertising domain, on its website. And then a lot more third-party domains that weren't blocked. Such privacy, much wow.
tanrax 6y ago
I don't know why you use Disqus when there is an Opensource alternative: Glosa --> https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server
- bartread 6y ago
  Several reasons immediately spring to mind: - it's yet another dependency on the back end (for a static site you may not even have a back end or a server you can install it on), - it requires Java, which is possibly yet another dependency and platform, - both of these need patching and updates - I do not love comment storage in JSON because it complicates backups - needs email configuration which can be something of a deliverability minefield, but Disqus handles this out of the box Fundamentally it's more work/complexity than some people will be willing to put in. Disqus is easy. Just drop it into your relevant page templates and it'll work.
maciekmm 6y ago
Shameless plug: I started building a small commenting system that fetches comments from social media postings (hackernews, reddit atm.) It's not released yet, but You can sign up to know when it's ready. https://popvox.dev/ https://popvox.dev/
morpheos137 6y ago
I am struggling to understand why anybody thought that "outsourcing" blog comments was a good idea. It seems like a really simple database function that could be self hosted easily.
- breischl 6y ago
  When you want to do voting, moderation, new/hot/etc, handle potentially large loads, it can get to be a lot. Also, if you don't want anonymous commenters (because that contributes to spam and bad community) you get into the entire user/password management mess. Particularly if you're just some guy that wanted to blog stuff, rather than a content-centric media corporation. Plus there's some potential benefit to having a consistent identity across different sites. FWIW, Facebook was doing the exact same thing. I think they still do, though I don't see it as much.
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  I don't know about in the past, but a lot of devs are big on static sites now. Comments require the overhead of a server.
Quanttek 6y ago
> How does Disqus sell your visitors' data with thirdparties without your consent? > Actually, you give them the consent when you agree to their privacy policy. I doubt that this is legal according to the GDPR. Also, didn't Mozilla also have a commenting system? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-post-reinventing-online-comments/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-...
clairegraham 6y ago
We used to have Disqus on our site and I can attest to it being a resource hog. We switched to Commento last year, which doesn't have as many features, but it shaved seconds off our page load time. My only complaint with Commento was that automated moderating / spam filtering worked better in Disqus than Commento.
winrid 6y ago
These are actually all the reasons I built https://fastcomments.com https://fastcomments.com It was originally just a tiny little project, amazing how things grow.
youngdynasty 6y ago
I’d rather just tweet a link to a blog post and let the discussion happen there. Plus, you get “free” eyeballs on it since it’ll appear in the commenter’s social graph. If you wanted to “own” the data, you could periodically scrape the tweet’s comments. I think there’s a cool product somewhere in there.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

527 points by supz_k 6y ago

At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The internet always have been a place where most stuff is free and people got used to that. At some point after that the dark parts and ad parts of the web will reside; but I do not think it will completely disappear.

yborg 6y ago
That will do nothing. They will take the sub revenue and keep the current privacy monetization too. The only way to stop it is legislation.
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives. I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.
    - unicornporn 6y ago
      There's an excellent example in this very thread on how politics (i.e. democracy) can trump capital. Read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131 More on this: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnrkbeta.no%2F2019%2F12%2F18%2Fdisqus-delte-persondata-om-titalls-millioner-internettbrukere-uten-at-nettsidene-visste-om-det%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnrkbeta.no%2F2020%2F09%2F04%2Fdatatilsynet-mener-det-er-sannsynlig-at-disqus-har-brutt-personvernloven%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt...
    - bachmeier 6y ago
      > The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives. I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.
      - Talanes 6y ago
        "What has happened is all that could happen" is surely not the best line of argument you have?
- strogonoff 6y ago
  If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS. If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive. The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.
  - orangepanda 6y ago
    > If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users Will it lose some users? Sure. Most? No. You can buy a tv costing 4 digits that happily will harvest data and show you ads.
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      First, could you name this TV set so that others don’t make the same mistake? TV prices decreased a lot over past years (50 inch 4K units go for below $500 I think), in fact I suspect that the hardware is sponsored by ad revenue in some cases. Second, context matters. Buying a TV is different from setting up a commenting system for your site. In one case you want to consume, in the other to be a service provider (you have a website, possibly generate profit from it, probably know what JavaScript is). Moreover, you are unlikely to be able to make your own TV, but you are much more likely to be able to set up your own commenting system if you can’t find a company to handle that responsibly.
  - Un1corn 6y ago
    >it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS So never? People don't read the ToS and certainly don't judge services by it. It seems people have come to accept surveillance capitalism as a fact of life
    - 6y ago
spijdar 6y ago
Even that may not be enough - the article mentions this, and points out that even the paid version of Disqus includes these trackers. Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and tracking, since providers can always make even more off both subscriptions and tracking...
pfranz 6y ago
I already think that has happened for companies and startups, but I don't think much progress at all has been made for individuals. I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening. One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or letting you cancel. How do you see the money side playing out?
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  > Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads ... Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening. Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do. If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some hacker-magnet database, or any of that. If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do all of that. The problem isn't a business problem or a technological problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty" allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for cryptocurrencies.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    The use case I was thinking of for individuals is more like paying a nickel to read an article. I'm not really familiar with AML/KYC requirements, but I'm not sure I see the need. I would imagine most people would want a basic account so they could revisit paid content later. Any laundering would get caught looking at your business' finances (what you do with the money) or tracking crypto accounts in a more traditional manor. I've used cryptocurrencies here and there for online services (merch and digital services) and don't remember any additional scrutiny. I reasons I had in mind are the confusion and overhead of using crypto for the average person. I guess if there were some regulatory requirements in a made-up "ideal" scenario, I would see it mirroring existing banks and credit cards where your source wallet was from a "sanctioned" account to track location for local taxes and whatnot. The onus wouldn't be put on the business other than having an allowlist (by prefix or something)--but none of that exists. I would think a lot more structure an institutions would need to exist anyway to make cryptocurrencies more palatable to individuals.
tal8d 6y ago
I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there, despite all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying noise.
- spicyramen 6y ago
  This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.
  - alexgmcm 6y ago
    Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it. But man, I really hate Medium.
    - geek_at 6y ago
      not true, I have started a blog and hosted it on blogspot at first but wasn't satisfied with the style in general and the lack of customization so I built my own in bootstrap + php and hosted it on a 5€/month Server. No tracking, no ads, no external libraries, no referral links, no monetization. After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc. Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down. You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading. https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at
baxtr 6y ago
I think this really depends on your moral compass. It’s not solely a matter of your business model. I don’t want to start paying for everything I want to read on the 50 pages I browse per week.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
While I agree that more people should be willing to pay for services, I'm less certain that it would actually make a huge difference. Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads. And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out. So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.
- mhb 6y ago
  Just a minor quibble about the Kindle since I'm very appreciative that there is a choice of buying one with or without ads.
codegladiator 6y ago
> and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
- pmyteh 6y ago
  Yes. And the 'paid so you are the customer, not the product' thing has limits. That was one of the original value propositions of cable television, but it turns out to be more profitable to get a platform monopoly and then sell ads as well as charging a fee. Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.
dmortin 6y ago
> At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The problem is not everyone has the means to pay for everything. E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't afford Youtube's fee.
a_imho 6y ago
Disagree. Imo most content is basically throwaway entertainment (especially social media) thus very interchangeable and has very little value. The internet is simply not that important.
clairegraham 6y ago
Commento.io is a very simple alternative that costs $10/month. We use that on downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
- laxmin 6y ago
  It is also open source and can be easily hosted. https://gitlab.com/commento https://gitlab.com/commento

darepublic 6y ago

roll your own commenting system

ogre_codes 6y ago
I've done it and it can be ugly. Eventually I just disabled all commenting and I'm happy with that.
dspillett 6y ago
That is the easy part. The faf is handling moderation. You won't need it at first but if you get any number of visitors worth counting there will be at least one loon amongst them uses your comment boxes to insult, drop in irrelevant musings for attention, hawk referrer links to products or links to try use you to game SEO, or to otherwise be an arse. And even before them you'll probably get the spam-bots, doing the above in an automated manner. Unless you actively moderate or have someone do it for you your site becomes something that presents that sort of rubbish to the rest of the Internet. If you have the time to deal with it fine, but do you really want that? One of the advantages of a centralised service like Disqus is that those services will filter a lot of that out for you. With a self-hosted solution you have to manage that yourself. I've seen some attempts at a decentralised group moderation idea but none I can mention that have survived long enough to gain any traction - none in fact that I thought were actually practical (if I can think of an easy way to game a system, you can bet anything that people who essentially game systems for living (or a regular hobby, just for shits & giggles) can too).

unicornporn 6y ago

How is this GDPR compliant? What tracking is used for EU citizens? I've seen no consent notices here in the EU.

nannal 6y ago
File a complaint to your local gdpr body
SahAssar 6y ago
It isn't, but I'm guessing their argument is that the website owner should get consent before loading their code. Of course in practice basically no one does that and they seem to be banking on that fact.
- 3np 6y ago
  Disqus is not necessarily off the hook here. GDPR identifies several roles with different requirements (Data Processor, Data Controller)
mmgu 6y ago
Disqus does not track users from GDPR countries by default. My initial story in December 2019 for the Norwegian broadcaster NRK was a result of Disqus not knowing Norway had the GDPR (we are part of EEA, but not EU). Users are checked based on IP whether they come from a GDPR country. If GDPR, they will be put in private mode. A user needs to create a profile and consent to sharing for tracking to begin. Norwegian DPA opened an investigation as a result of our stories and Norwegians are now in private mode by default.
- seanhunter 6y ago
  Fair to say this is necessary but not sufficient. GDPR covers users within GDPR countries but also European data subjects wherever they are in the world.
  - Daho0n 6y ago

unicornporn 6y ago

The one thing you can't do as a developer in 2021 is claim innocence while you're letting these companies feast on your visitors data. You do know how these things work and you're assisting surveillance capitalism. You are complicit in your silent embedding of these tracking devices.

andrewflnr 6y ago

What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento (https://github.com/adtac/commento https://github.com/adtac/commento) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.

input_sh 6y ago
I've seen some examples in which people embed Discourse discussions. There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.
- wyattjoh 6y ago
  Lead developer at Coral here (so some experience :P) Coral is more suited typically to larger organizations trying to power multi-site community tools. It has a powerful moderation system that's all open source! It's probably overkill for a static blog or small site.
andreareina 6y ago
I helped someone set up discourse[1] a long time ago, don't know how it stands up these days; it's got basically zero presence in the parts of the web I'm around. [1] https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Discourse is quite popular, I see it regularly on new sites. Though it doesn't really fit the same niche as disqus.
  - CarVac 6y ago
    I've seen it used to operate as footer comments on blogs.

outsomnia 6y ago

Article only makes it clear at the end that it is an ad for author's "privacy first" competitor... which is a paid-for product.

scubbo 6y ago
And? The article _starts_ with the point that "if the product is free, you are the product". Shouldn't we therefore _prefer_ a paid-for model, which must demonstrate its value in competition with similar competitors (for instance, by protecting privacy better?) Not all free markets are bad (though many are, and many are less free than they appear). A good free product is good, but I would rather a good not-free one than a bad free one.
- outsomnia 6y ago
  > And? ... and I won't read these fake advertorials if I don't get cheated into reading them by witholding the admission about what they are until the end. I don't want to be lectured about Dark Patterns by a guy who deliberately misled me as his first and only interaction with me.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I agree. It is frustrating because it is otherwise a good article and likely accurate.
  - ymolodtsov 6y ago
    It's like that Social Dilemma movie which is 100% based on the tactics of fear and engagement generation it ascribes to social network.
- ymolodtsov 6y ago
  By they way, you're not paying for Hacker News the last time I checked. "If the product is free you're the product" is such a blatant statement people throw around like they don't have to prove their point anymore.

somedude895 6y ago

> ib.adnxs.com - Malware site, "Adnxs appeared as the eighth-biggest name in our Tracking the Trackers data This is AppNexus, the second-biggest display ad broker after Google. It can be argued that both Google and AppNexus facilitate the spreading of malware by injecting ads which sometimes aren't properly vetted, but simply calling it a malware site is very misleading.

bzb6 6y ago
A contrarian blog post lying to get its point across? Now that couldn’t be.
BLKNSLVR 6y ago
"aren't properly vetted" Malware distribution by negligence and "malware site" are a hairs breadth apart on my scale, especially when it's negligence on behalf of an ad-broker. That kind of negligence is what gives their entire industry a bad name. But then I consider trackers as malware anyway, as is my personal bias.

CaptArmchair 6y ago

I've been around long enough to have seen how comments on the Web emerged from innocuous guest books and a feature in personal blogging and ended up being un-ironically slapped to any 5-line piece of content. Disqus and their ilk exist because of one reason only: convenience. (a) You don't need to install software and a database to store comments, (b) you don't need to maintain that software or worry that it's an attack vector (c) you don't need to pay for hosting and (d) you don't need to worry about comment spam. While that's all valid, I feel a moral question lurks beneath the surface. If you host a website, you are establishing a bond of trust with visitors. And your visitors can and will hold you accountable for the experience you offer. A foundational principle and the promise of the Web was (and still is) that information is shared in an equitable fashion. That doesn't mean you have to serve content for free or peanuts (there's nothing wrong with paid content). It does mean that no matter what you do, you can never outsource responsibility over what you put on line. This pertains both to functionality as well as the content itself. Companies like Disqus have jumped into a niche: removing the costs (time / money) of self-hosting and managing comments. It's totally fine to pull their infrastructure into your own website via - ultimately - an <iframe> tag. But you do have a responsibility towards your visitors to do your due diligence and assert that the services you're relying on won't compromise your own bond of trust with your visitors. Asserting that due diligence is a big issue. Not everyone is doing this, and enough companies and individuals will shirk their responsibility for the sake of convenience and costs. Over the past 15 years, the Web has become riddled with embeds, widgets and iframes. It's not just Disqus, it's literally any copy-and-paste code which people add in matter-of-factly without considering the consequences. WordPress, for instance, offers oembed support out of the box. Drop in a YouTube or Instagram link and it will automagically transform into a widget. Extremely convenient, but it's an open door for trackers. https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/ https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/ This leaves you, as a visitor of websites, in a bind: you can't trust websites to not have a tracker In the EU, that's where the GDPR does make a difference. If you want to be compliant, you will need to either jump through several technical hoops to give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of trackers... or you simply stop relying on third-party embeds all together since they now pose a legal liability. In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment box on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you provide them with insights in how you manage their comments. The GDPR is actively enforced and companies and individuals do get fined for not adhering to the rules. https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights

atomicson 6y ago

We forget, the main reason we post a comment is to be read by others. So there's nothing wrong because it is "you" wrote the comments and it is "you". Sure you already read their Terms of Service (ToS) before embedding their product in your website. There is no free lunch as there are some costs to develop and maintain a product. If you are a coder, develop your own commenting system is not hard. They just do what they do for survival, like everybody else.

blackcats 6y ago

This is why I dropped disqus and made my own comment system https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/ https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/

throw14082020 6y ago

The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced. I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.

spinningslate 6y ago
I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue - so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive. On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us? A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!". "Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy invasion and refuse to pay for stuff. [0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-update-impacts-small-business-ads https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-...
- hobofan 6y ago
  I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle. I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts. I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.

pawurb 6y ago

I've stopped using Disqus on my blog for exactly the reasons described. I've switched to https://commento.io/ https://commento.io/ and the site started loading noticably faster.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Every time I see Disqus on a site I wonder why people use it. The page load lag alone is bad enough.
- darekkay 6y ago
  It's free, easy to integrate, many people already have an account. Those were the reasons for me. But in the end, the drawbacks were enough for me to remove Disqus.

matgillard 6y ago

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

roelschroeven 6y ago
If you are paying for it, you are the customer, and you're still being sold. From the article: > When you provide a free product, money should come from somewhere. Disqus uses advertising for that. Now, I subscribed to a paid plan trial of Disqus to see if things change or not. No! Even in the paid plans, the same pixels are loaded on the client-side.

ogre_codes 6y ago

Where are all the defenders claiming this is all necessary and great because it enables superior advertising? Whenever we have a Google or Facebook they always seem to crawl out of the woodwork, no love for the small businesses which rely on advertising here?

marcjensen 6y ago

> Obviously, advertising companies do everything to increase their revenue. It's bit naive. Every company exists to increase their revenue.

throw8932894 6y ago

Is there a way to use github for commenting system? I have a site hosted on github, most users are devs...

ohduran 6y ago
utterances! https://github.com/utterance/utterances https://github.com/utterance/utterances
kidscancode 6y ago
I've just switched from using Disqus to this type of setup. I create a GH issue for each post, and then pull comments using the Github API. This article has a great overview of how it can work: http://donw.io/post/github-comments/ http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

polevaultweb 6y ago

I'm using ReplyBox on all my sites and client sites, it's a lightweight and slick alternative https://getreplybox.com/ https://getreplybox.com/

h_anna_h 6y ago

I have (had) a Disqus account that I connected to via my google account. I say had because I haven't been able to login in a year or so via firefox. I just get a page that says "There was an error submitting the form. If you're having difficulty, try repeating the action on https://disqus.com https://disqus.com" with an annoying meme gift on the background. Luckily the title of the page says "Embed: CSRF verification failed (403)" but I have not been able to find a way to fix it. Oh well, I guess I won't be commenting on any site with disqus anytime soon. I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments.

loop22 6y ago
> I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments. IIRC the Dissenter extension was just that, albeit centralized.
- vvatermelone 6y ago
  There's an extension called Epiverse that does something similar. It used to have its own comment sections like Dissenter, but has since shifted to just showing discussions on reddit/HN that point to the webpage you're currently on. It's actually how I discovered HN.
type0 6y ago
> I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments. Not exactly for comments, but look at https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is it is for collaborative note taking
criddell 6y ago
I also have a Disqus account and at some point it got flagged (incorrectly) for spam. I've emailed them and asked in their forums for it to be fixed but apparently it isn't something they will fix.

darekkay 6y ago

I've started collecting different ways to include blog comments a few years ago [1]. After using Disqus for several years, I've removed the comments on my blog and link to social networks instead (mostly Twitter and Mastodon). [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

joveian 6y ago
Nice list, thanks. The one other possibility that I personally like but is out of fasion these days is the mailing list. A private archive mailing list with moderate first comment seems like it should be fairly easy to maintain, although I haven't actually tried yet. This would best be combined with the manual method you mention and would likely mostly work when there is something beyond the blog itself drawing people to be interested in the discussion (or maybe sufficienly popular blogs it could work anyway). The benefits of that method as I see it are: discussion can more easily go beyond particular blog posts, the website can potentially be fully static, and (sometimes an advantage, sometimes disadvantage) only the more interested people (in either the blog or community depending on how it is described) will bother subscribing. Also, it makes it possible (once you have subscribers at least) to first write posts to the list and get some comments before revealing it to the world. The main disadvantage I see for someone who otherwise finds the other tradeoffs ok is that people are understandibly more reluctant to reveal their email these days and many people don't have a basic conception of what a discussion mailing list is so it would be a good idea to have a general FAQ that describes the basics and links to some free email providers.

paulcarroty 6y ago

Alternatives from my notes (never used them IRL): * https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman * https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack

mradmin 6y ago
Staticman is awesome for static websites! (next.js, jekyll etc). It provides user content via pull requests. That's all it does! This means you have complete control over the UI. No loading of 3rd party scripts etc. I wrote a blog post about integrating it into Next.js: https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-nextjs https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-...

AntiImperialist 6y ago

True about if something is free, you are the product. Like this article made available for free written by a competitor to disqus.

xfz 6y ago

Title should probably have [Advert] prefix or something. That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did. The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).

dmos62 6y ago
Spotify relies on monopolizing your listening data. You should avoid it on the same premise. Delivering music is easy; their unique offering is the recommendation engine. There's no competition because there's no open listening data. If we could make it open, then you could have actual competition in the space (coincidentlly Spotify recommendations aren't great at the moment).
- hnra 6y ago
  Does any other service deliver music and podcasts at a much lower price then?
  - sofixa 6y ago
    Plenty of alternatives exist - YouTube Premium ( which also gets you YouTube with no adds, on top of YouTube Music), Amazon Music, Apple Music, and iirc pandora, SoundCloud? I haven't compared prices.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      Can't really suggest YT as an alternative to a monopoly
      - throwaways885 6y ago
        Is either company a monopoly in "music streaming" if they're both viable alternatives?

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Once, a number of years ago (Disqus has been around a while), I signed up for a Disqus account. As part of the process, the service showed me a page of comments from around the Web, and asked if they were mine, and, if so, would I like to associate them with the account. I was horrified. They included some...rather “rash” comments that I had made, over the years (I was not always the stuffy boomer that I am now). Many were quite old, and, I had thought, made anonymously. I scragged the process immediately, and made a vow to be a good boy, from then on (I had already made that choice, years earlier, but this solidified it). Nowadays, I deliberately associate myself with my online comments. I nuked my last anonymous account years ago. It is my opinion that anonymity is an illusion, these days. I feel that knowing my words can come back to haunt me, helps me to be more careful in what I say; just like in real life.

m000 6y ago

FWIW, pi.hole with the default blacklist of domains blocks all but one of the listed tracker domains. Disqus still works with those domains blocked.

deleted 6y ago

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EGreg 6y ago

This is so stupid, by the way. Can’t Disqus simply use its OWN third party cookie in the back end to inform all these other sites and grab their information to display, even cache some of it? Disqus is being sloppy and just angering its own “customers” is the websites and users.

dredmorbius 6y ago
I've seen suggested before that third-party tracking is used to validate results and prevent self-dealing and fraud. When your primary function is counting things, trusting the tallymen is critical. Multiple independent counts addresses this. How true this is I don't know. Dispensing with the counting avoids this need.

101008 6y ago

Is there a good alternative that it is easy to migrate to from Disqus? I dont want to lose all the comments that I had on my blog.

beastman82 6y ago
This guy is selling exactly that
- 101008 6y ago
  But it isn't free :-D
foxhop 6y ago
I can help you migrate your comments into Remarkbox (founder). I used to be able to import users but they stopped exporting email addresses from the disqus XML. So instead I import user surrogates. Reach out directly, Remarkbox is free now!

eliben 6y ago

Turned off Disqus on my blog a couple of years ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...) and have been generally happy since then.

kevincox 6y ago
I also recently turned it off. I had gotten a couple of comments in the past but my blog is quite low-traffic. Mostly a place for me to practice writing (and occasionally vent). However I did like the simplicity of Disqus. I tried looking around for something similar with the following requirements: - No third party code on my domain. - Minimal code to write myself. Most of these tools work using an iframe, so the code that they run on your domain is minimal but they end up loading as a script that injects the iframe. AFAICT the primary reason for this is is so that they can adjust the height of the iframe automatically. In some cases I could pull a pinned version of that API from NPM or similar however it would be nice if there was a truly minimal snippet that I could use. It also makes me wonder, if iframes could have a dynamic height would this ecosystem flourish? In the end I just added links at the bottom of each post to search for mentions on Reddit/Twitter and another link to share the post there. I then use a WebMentions bridge to collect responses. Right now I haven't published the code that displays WebMentions automatically but I might do that in the future.

jonnycomputer 6y ago

I miss the golden age of blogs, bulletin boards, and of mailing lists, frankly. They are still out there, of course, but focus seems to have shifted. Twitter is so much more immediate, and I think it has displaced blog post consumption. To our detriment in many ways.

jwr 6y ago

This is so amusing to me — I remember when Disqus was being built and beginning to gain traction, lofty ideas of "comments and discussions done right" were being thrown around. I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a third party, becoming tied to them and all the data tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future. Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-) Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or Google+, remember that?).

tyingq 6y ago

I wonder if anyone has considered using Gmail or another free email provider to be their comment backer. You get an API that already supports threading.

dannyw 6y ago
Someone sends a very bad link (eg CP) and all of your google accounts get nuked immediately without any chance of appeal.
- foxhop 6y ago
  Yup. Be vary careful with your big tech accounts. They may be revoked without any path to resolution.
yabones 6y ago
There was a post here a couple weeks ago about using Mastodon (ActivityPub) to add a comment feed to a static site. Seems like an interesting idea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

foxhop 6y ago

If you are looking for a free hosted comment system, check out Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com I'm the founder and in 2021, the service is now Free for all to use. Check out my reasons for opening up the service to all here: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.... Big Tech must NOT have a monopoly on moderation!

foolinaround 6y ago
how do you generate revenue to sustain this service?

chrisMyzel 6y ago

"disqusting" - thanks for the article!

carlbordum 6y ago

Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels. This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to us on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/, https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments

johs 6y ago
why not activatypub
searchableguy 6y ago
That's pretty interesting. I will check it out. Thanks for sharing. :D
seanyesmunt 6y ago
When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing Detection" message. > This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
vlmutolo 6y ago
I think using Matrix for this is absolutely the right way to go. Does cactus conform to the threading specification? I was planning on eventually trying this myself, but felt like I should wait until the threading MSC stabilized.
- bashbjorn 6y ago
  Aforementionend friend and Cactus Comments dev here. We don't support any sort of threading yet, although Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are a higher priority right now. We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.

CA0DA 6y ago

From a month ago: "Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

aww_dang 6y ago

There are some interesting features in Disqus's "import comments" feature. Most of the fun has been closed. But yeah, for vanilla purposes the criticism is deserved.

learyjk 6y ago

Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's functionality by directing users who had made comments to really shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/ https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/ I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!

elliekelly 6y ago
This is not even remotely related to your comment but wow your bolognese looks incredible.
- learyjk 6y ago
  lmao I will continue to share anything I can build a meat mountain with! Analytics for my site on 5FEB showed 200 people visited my Disqus post and then 50 people clicked on the "Food" tag. Apparently people who consume tech news also like food a lot. Thanks HN.

rendall 6y ago

I've been building a commenting system called Simple Comment that leverages free-tier offerings for hosting and data. So, you own it, hosting and data. It's at MVP status now, but it's as-yet pretty rough. You're welcome to try it out. I'd love feedback. https://simple-comment.netlify.app/ https://simple-comment.netlify.app/ Heck, be the first to leave a comment! It has one customer so far: my blog. https://blog.rendall.dev https://blog.rendall.dev

grishka 6y ago

> consider migrating from Disqus to a privacy-first commenting system. One such service is Hyvor Talk I see blocked requests to doubleclick.net, which is a Google advertising domain, on its website. And then a lot more third-party domains that weren't blocked. Such privacy, much wow.

tanrax 6y ago

I don't know why you use Disqus when there is an Opensource alternative: Glosa --> https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server

bartread 6y ago
Several reasons immediately spring to mind: - it's yet another dependency on the back end (for a static site you may not even have a back end or a server you can install it on), - it requires Java, which is possibly yet another dependency and platform, - both of these need patching and updates - I do not love comment storage in JSON because it complicates backups - needs email configuration which can be something of a deliverability minefield, but Disqus handles this out of the box Fundamentally it's more work/complexity than some people will be willing to put in. Disqus is easy. Just drop it into your relevant page templates and it'll work.

maciekmm 6y ago

Shameless plug: I started building a small commenting system that fetches comments from social media postings (hackernews, reddit atm.) It's not released yet, but You can sign up to know when it's ready. https://popvox.dev/ https://popvox.dev/

morpheos137 6y ago

I am struggling to understand why anybody thought that "outsourcing" blog comments was a good idea. It seems like a really simple database function that could be self hosted easily.

breischl 6y ago
When you want to do voting, moderation, new/hot/etc, handle potentially large loads, it can get to be a lot. Also, if you don't want anonymous commenters (because that contributes to spam and bad community) you get into the entire user/password management mess. Particularly if you're just some guy that wanted to blog stuff, rather than a content-centric media corporation. Plus there's some potential benefit to having a consistent identity across different sites. FWIW, Facebook was doing the exact same thing. I think they still do, though I don't see it as much.
schwartzworld 6y ago
I don't know about in the past, but a lot of devs are big on static sites now. Comments require the overhead of a server.

Quanttek 6y ago

> How does Disqus sell your visitors' data with thirdparties without your consent? > Actually, you give them the consent when you agree to their privacy policy. I doubt that this is legal according to the GDPR. Also, didn't Mozilla also have a commenting system? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-post-reinventing-online-comments/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-...

clairegraham 6y ago

We used to have Disqus on our site and I can attest to it being a resource hog. We switched to Commento last year, which doesn't have as many features, but it shaved seconds off our page load time. My only complaint with Commento was that automated moderating / spam filtering worked better in Disqus than Commento.

winrid 6y ago

These are actually all the reasons I built https://fastcomments.com https://fastcomments.com It was originally just a tiny little project, amazing how things grow.

youngdynasty 6y ago

I’d rather just tweet a link to a blog post and let the discussion happen there. Plus, you get “free” eyeballs on it since it’ll appear in the commenter’s social graph. If you wanted to “own” the data, you could periodically scrape the tweet’s comments. I think there’s a cool product somewhere in there.

deleted 2y ago

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