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-ir

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