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Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? I just don't see the value and

Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments. Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". I picture that last one coming from the "engineers" who build those hazardous off-the-line chargers you see at gas station check out counters. Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.

MikeTaylor 6y ago
The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-800m-sauropod-would-look-like/#comment-223988 https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...
rileymat2 6y ago
Just yesterday I went though a Kubernetes tutorial and hung up on one step, others in the comments did as well. Very useful. Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different debugging approaches.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
I've ran a blog that was quite popular within the torrent community. The comment section itself was a reason to visit the blog. If you have an active community or you want to build an active community comments are a must. Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable. If your blog is just so you can write what you currently think about things then there is little value.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  You can accomplish the same with a mailing list. Users don't even need to create an account; they just click the "mailto:" link at the bottom of your article and type their comment in their preferred client. They can browse the archives for a threaded discussion. That being said, the best comment platform for a blog is, imo, someone else's blog. If you want to leave a comment, write your own (micro)blog post and send a Webmention. I wrote about this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043298
greggman3 6y ago
I want people's feedback and questions. I want that feedback, questions, and their answers, to be public. Email is private which means if one person asks a question my answer has to be repeated for each person. As comments on the blog others can read the the feedback and responses. As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus. (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to disqus. I will keep on using them.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away. The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there. That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.
- jonnycomputer 6y ago
  Yes, but then your community becomes subject to the whims of Twitter/Reddit/etc. I've been feeling it these days, helping my spouse with their art career.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  You make a good point I should have added. Outsource the community to an external platform and let someone else handle the comments, spam, moderation, etc.
nickjj 6y ago
> I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments. I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments. I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely happen. I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed. It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content. I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500 comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker). The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks, worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks asking for tech support because it didn't work for them. Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker directly. I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate, keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in between.
- foxhop 6y ago
  I can help you import your users and comments into Remarkbox if you like to move your community.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    Thanks a lot for the offer but I think I'm going to decline for now. It's nothing personal or even related to your comment service specifically. For the sake of transparency here's the questions going through my mind and how I arrived at this decision based on using the free version of Disqus: - A lot of people have a Disqus account and having a low barrier of entry to comment is important. When most folks don't need to create an account, that's kind of nice. - Disqus has been around for a really long time and has handled billions of comments. This gives me confidence the service isn't going to be down for maintenance regularly, or just break one day. - Disqus has a pretty good spam filter due to having so much volume. I would rather not be bothered by having to do manual spam moderation regularly and if I hooked up a 3rd party service to do that I would end up either having to pay for that, or you're still allowing another company to profit from your data. - Disqus makes it pretty easy to moderate comments. You get notified of a new comment by email, click it, and then hit a drop down and figure out how you want to moderate it. - Most developers are using some form of ad-blocker so Disqus' invasive ads are stopped. Although Disqus can still read the contents of the comments and profit from them in other ways (improve services around paid offerings, maybe selling the data to other companies doing ML around written text, etc.). To be fair this is also why I haven't picked any semi-popular open source self hosted comment solutions. I wouldn't mind self hosting it alongside my blog on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server, but all of my objections apply to this as well. And now there's also the added risk of the code having security vulnerabilities that could potentially expose my server or even worse leak personal data from the people who have commented, such as their email address. I could write the code myself which I've thought about for a while too, but the spam problem is still there. There's also allocating all of the time necessary to implement such a thing in a production ready way. When really all I want to do is create new blog posts / videos and have a way for folks to contribute to the conversation in a persisted way.
coldtea 6y ago
>Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues? >Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not true for other kinds of blogs. >Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away. That doesn't foster a community of discussion. See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.

MikeTaylor 6y ago

The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-800m-sauropod-would-look-like/#comment-223988 https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...

rileymat2 6y ago

Just yesterday I went though a Kubernetes tutorial and hung up on one step, others in the comments did as well. Very useful. Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different debugging approaches.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

I've ran a blog that was quite popular within the torrent community. The comment section itself was a reason to visit the blog. If you have an active community or you want to build an active community comments are a must. Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable. If your blog is just so you can write what you currently think about things then there is little value.

Seirdy 6y ago
You can accomplish the same with a mailing list. Users don't even need to create an account; they just click the "mailto:" link at the bottom of your article and type their comment in their preferred client. They can browse the archives for a threaded discussion. That being said, the best comment platform for a blog is, imo, someone else's blog. If you want to leave a comment, write your own (micro)blog post and send a Webmention. I wrote about this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043298

greggman3 6y ago

I want people's feedback and questions. I want that feedback, questions, and their answers, to be public. Email is private which means if one person asks a question my answer has to be repeated for each person. As comments on the blog others can read the the feedback and responses. As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus. (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to disqus. I will keep on using them.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away. The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there. That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.

jonnycomputer 6y ago
Yes, but then your community becomes subject to the whims of Twitter/Reddit/etc. I've been feeling it these days, helping my spouse with their art career.
MisterTea 6y ago
You make a good point I should have added. Outsource the community to an external platform and let someone else handle the comments, spam, moderation, etc.

nickjj 6y ago

> I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments. I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments. I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely happen. I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed. It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content. I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500 comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker). The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks, worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks asking for tech support because it didn't work for them. Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker directly. I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate, keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in between.

foxhop 6y ago
I can help you import your users and comments into Remarkbox if you like to move your community.
- nickjj 6y ago
  Thanks a lot for the offer but I think I'm going to decline for now. It's nothing personal or even related to your comment service specifically. For the sake of transparency here's the questions going through my mind and how I arrived at this decision based on using the free version of Disqus: - A lot of people have a Disqus account and having a low barrier of entry to comment is important. When most folks don't need to create an account, that's kind of nice. - Disqus has been around for a really long time and has handled billions of comments. This gives me confidence the service isn't going to be down for maintenance regularly, or just break one day. - Disqus has a pretty good spam filter due to having so much volume. I would rather not be bothered by having to do manual spam moderation regularly and if I hooked up a 3rd party service to do that I would end up either having to pay for that, or you're still allowing another company to profit from your data. - Disqus makes it pretty easy to moderate comments. You get notified of a new comment by email, click it, and then hit a drop down and figure out how you want to moderate it. - Most developers are using some form of ad-blocker so Disqus' invasive ads are stopped. Although Disqus can still read the contents of the comments and profit from them in other ways (improve services around paid offerings, maybe selling the data to other companies doing ML around written text, etc.). To be fair this is also why I haven't picked any semi-popular open source self hosted comment solutions. I wouldn't mind self hosting it alongside my blog on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server, but all of my objections apply to this as well. And now there's also the added risk of the code having security vulnerabilities that could potentially expose my server or even worse leak personal data from the people who have commented, such as their email address. I could write the code myself which I've thought about for a while too, but the spam problem is still there. There's also allocating all of the time necessary to implement such a thing in a production ready way. When really all I want to do is create new blog posts / videos and have a way for folks to contribute to the conversation in a persisted way.

coldtea 6y ago

>Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues? >Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not true for other kinds of blogs. >Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away. That doesn't foster a community of discussion. See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.