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Medium and Substack are a plight on the web. Substack is better but it'll go the same way as Medium. They start out nice, but then become slow with trackers and

Medium and Substack are a plight on the web. Substack is better but it'll go the same way as Medium. They start out nice, but then become slow with trackers and what-have-you, and then start charging a commission to read: bait-and-walled-garden. I know not everyone is a programmer and not everyone can make their own website, but I've started to yearn for a livejournal or blogger site and wince when I find myself on a medium.com page

GardenLetter27 2y ago
It's a shame as there are economies of scale to having a big platform too. Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.
- tarkin2 2y ago
  Comments were the only annoying thing on my old site. I used disqus but then that was rather invasive and annoying. A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
  - GardenLetter27 2y ago
    ISPs no longer providing free hosting and VMs, and blocking port forwarding doesn't help either.
  - tomhoward 2y ago
    Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.
    - tarkin2 2y ago
      I’d argue these aren’t problems for all but the most frequented sites. Throwing your site behind someone’s walled-garden rather than developing the 100 or so lines to deal with the problem seems a shame. Thinking aloud: Query your one SQLite table for unchecked comments, send each to telegram/a single HTML page with ‘approve’ and ‘censor’ buttons. Auto-unapprove-and-uncheck comments with words from an editable list (NFT, Bitcoin, etc). Easy and would cater for most personal/hobby use cases.
      - tomhoward 2y ago
        I think you may be underestimating how bad bot spam on web forms is these days. It’s nothing to do with how well frequented your site is; any site that can be found by a web spider is going to get bot spam. Of course you’re completely free to try it, and indeed it’s pointless to spend any more time debating it here. You really should just try it if you want to. I guess what I’m saying is the reason most people find it best just to use a 3rd party platform is not because nobody can write “100 lines of code” to do it themselves, but because if they do that they experience the spam problem and just decide it’s not worth it. That was my experience. That said, it may be easier to combat spam now with a classifier using an LLM or BERT.
  - rroose 2y ago
    I use cleantalk on my Drupal website (but it's also available on other systems, such as WordPress) and only get a few spam comments a month. Its also cheap: 12 dollars a year and you can earn extra credits reporting spam comments that slip through.
- toastercat 2y ago
  You can always use Mastodon[1] or Github[2] for comments. [1] https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments [2] https://github.com/giscus/giscus https://github.com/giscus/giscus
  - justaj 2y ago
    Once can at least archive Medium and Substack pages on the Wayback machine. They're also generally fine when viewed without JS. Mastodon pages? Not so much.
allen_berg 2y ago
I think you mean blight
kirso 2y ago
The problem is that substack also solves for distribution. Blogger doesn't but I don't think any VC backed version of this can succeed because ultimately our craving is to have a free space to read quality content and the incentive of these platforms is to maximise revenue which just don't go hand in hand. So the result is this dissonance. I hope one day we will see a platform that can both sustain (without the goal of going IPO) We need bootstrapped Medium in a way.

GardenLetter27 2y ago

It's a shame as there are economies of scale to having a big platform too. Like I can (and do) host a static blog, but I don't have much time to attend to it - so it's nice on the main platforms that they handle comments and so on.

tarkin2 2y ago
Comments were the only annoying thing on my old site. I used disqus but then that was rather invasive and annoying. A single SQLite3 table and a post, approve and delete end points would be about 100 lines of code and would cater for 90% of hobby/personal sites Part of the reason the web is so soulless and drab is that people no longer have the skills to create simple functionality. I almost yearn for the days of PHP
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  ISPs no longer providing free hosting and VMs, and blocking port forwarding doesn't help either.
- tomhoward 2y ago
  Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.
  - tarkin2 2y ago
    I’d argue these aren’t problems for all but the most frequented sites. Throwing your site behind someone’s walled-garden rather than developing the 100 or so lines to deal with the problem seems a shame. Thinking aloud: Query your one SQLite table for unchecked comments, send each to telegram/a single HTML page with ‘approve’ and ‘censor’ buttons. Auto-unapprove-and-uncheck comments with words from an editable list (NFT, Bitcoin, etc). Easy and would cater for most personal/hobby use cases.
    - tomhoward 2y ago
      I think you may be underestimating how bad bot spam on web forms is these days. It’s nothing to do with how well frequented your site is; any site that can be found by a web spider is going to get bot spam. Of course you’re completely free to try it, and indeed it’s pointless to spend any more time debating it here. You really should just try it if you want to. I guess what I’m saying is the reason most people find it best just to use a 3rd party platform is not because nobody can write “100 lines of code” to do it themselves, but because if they do that they experience the spam problem and just decide it’s not worth it. That was my experience. That said, it may be easier to combat spam now with a classifier using an LLM or BERT.
- rroose 2y ago
  I use cleantalk on my Drupal website (but it's also available on other systems, such as WordPress) and only get a few spam comments a month. Its also cheap: 12 dollars a year and you can earn extra credits reporting spam comments that slip through.
toastercat 2y ago
You can always use Mastodon[1] or Github[2] for comments. [1] https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments https://grahammacphee.com/writing/mastodon-blog-comments [2] https://github.com/giscus/giscus https://github.com/giscus/giscus
- justaj 2y ago
  Once can at least archive Medium and Substack pages on the Wayback machine. They're also generally fine when viewed without JS. Mastodon pages? Not so much.

allen_berg 2y ago

I think you mean blight

kirso 2y ago

The problem is that substack also solves for distribution. Blogger doesn't but I don't think any VC backed version of this can succeed because ultimately our craving is to have a free space to read quality content and the incentive of these platforms is to maximise revenue which just don't go hand in hand. So the result is this dissonance. I hope one day we will see a platform that can both sustain (without the goal of going IPO) We need bootstrapped Medium in a way.