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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
- phendrenad2 1y agoI don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
- rwmj 1y agoIf you really run it "for years without maintenance" then your blog will get taken over by attackers and used to distribute malware or worse.
- JdeBP 1y agoIndeed, the problem isn't necessarily even the site being taken over. There was an example of what happens to comments over a period of 9 years without anyone dealing with spam on Hacker News just the other day. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370971
- rokkamokka 1y agoWell, back in the day this lead to thousands upon thousands of vulnerable WordPress sites
- mickeyp 1y agoFalse equivalence. That the creators of various PHP blogging platforms sucked at security does not invalidate the poster's point that a self-hosted CMS with a simple comment system is indeed much simpler and easier to reason about.
- rokkamokka 1y agoI suppose it's rather the "without maintenance" part. Had everyone updated their WordPress sites the problem would've been much less.
- InMice 1y agoThe wordpress core can be kept up to date but the vulnerabilities from plugins, relying on fixes and updating plugins i think was more the problem than the core. In the 2010s if you left a wordpress blog unattended even with the official default filter plugin it would fill with spam comments. I dont know if thats still a problem.
- robinsonb5 1y agoMy own blog - which gets maybe a couple of posts a year these days, and almost no audience - had 59 spam comments so far today. It really is time I turned off comments.
- InMice 1y agoSame here with any blog ive ever hosted
- antiloper 1y agoOnce you add comments you have to add a database and anti-spam measures. Not so simple anymore.
- edarchis 1y agoThe author is using a random CMS, namely Hugo. You probably mean a PHP that can be hosted for cheap. But then, you end up with a Wordpress nightmare, even more spam and security issues. I had a pretty popular blog and some posts gathered hundreds of useful comments. But I was so tired of fighting spam that I threw it all away and started using Hugo too, without comments.
- kakarot253 1y agoMe too, there is no need to have comments I feel you can have a feedback button at most if you want it.
- mixedbit 1y agoComments are the only functionality of a blog that require write access to a backend, without comments a blog can be a simple collection of static files. Any write access to a backend exposes the blog to potential vulnerabilities, requires the backend to be kept up to date. This is not dead simple and does require maintenance. Updating is not trivial if a version of a backend becomes obsolete, you need to dedicate time to migrate your backend to new versions to stay secure.
- undebuggable 1y agoWithout comments it's much simpler and cheaper than a $5 VPS and a random CMS, with comments it's much complicated and expensive than a $5 VPS and a random CMS.
- HeckFeck 1y agoI've been using self-hosted Isso to serve comments on my static sites. It's worked well enough, it's practically the same as Disqus.
- Hard_Space 1y agoDisqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be running for a day, or even a weekend. They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago[dead]
- jaapz 1y agoWhen it was released there were no ads at all, and it was a great way of quickly adding comments to your site. Of course there is no thing as free lunch so the enshittification was inevitable
- chuckadams 1y agoDisqus was openly bragging about how many people they were tracking and data-mining from day 1.
- niutech 1y agoThere is a free lunch - see all those FOSS commenting systems.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago[flagged]
- MasterScrat 1y agoI think the concern of "blog comments" is best left to external platforms eg HN, Reddit etc What would be more useful would be an automated list of places where the post has been discussed (and maybe pull the top comments from there through API?)
- reactordev 1y agoThere used to be a time when comments were attached to the posts. Where anyone could come, leave their name and a comment, and let the author know if any edits, misspellings, or how they liked the article. Social media ruined that. Everyone is now on their own soap box posting comments of drivel from their sub-optimal self-conscious parroting asinine talking points about how one characterized group of statistics ruined it for everyone else. Bots, drivel, linkbacks, social media, stupid laws, and an aversion to independence - we have what we have today. Large platforms that trick humans into use because they have the largest arenas. Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads. Because they ran ad-free for so long it’s possible their token in the AdTech ecosystem is stale in which case it hasn’t put it into any buckets yet. Ergo, you get the smoking/drinking/scamming/doesn’t fit category. A “token” is a device or ident signature used to identify a viewer or user so that they can tabulate impressions, build personas, categorize your shopping habits, track the sites you visit, link your token with others in your proximity
- johannes1234321 1y ago> Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads... Well, so they may see worse ads.
- mschuster91 1y ago> Social media ruined that. Everyone is now on their own soap box posting comments of drivel from their sub-optimal self-conscious parroting asinine talking points about how one characterized group of statistics ruined it for everyone else. Partially agree, partially disagree. Blog comments were already dead when SEO fraudsters discovered that "linkbacks" could be abused for spam even easier than comments were.
- est 1y agoI ditched Disqus for the exact same reason, too many ads Then I built an alternative using free Cloudflare Worker https://github.com/est/req4cmt https://github.com/est/req4cmt It's a simple service that transform comment POST form data to JSON, append to a .jsonl file, then do a `git push` It renders comments by `git fetch` from a .jsonl file from a remote repo, or simply via raw.githubusercontent.com if your repo was hosted by Github. The advantange over Github issue/discussion based comment plugins: 1. All data is stored a .git 2. no login of any sort Github OAuth login might leak all your repo data along with your `access_token` to the plugin provider. The `git push` works for any remote. You can choose github/gitlab or whatever.
- ffsm8 1y agoThe issue with that approach is risk. You now have a direct way for users to insert data into your repo, which can include illegal things. And if you're required to delete it later, you'll be forced to edit your git history. But if everyone behaves, it's a great solution
- bmez 1y agoand the wasted CPU and memory involved. Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system, it is overcomplicating it in ways previously unimaginable.
- est 1y ago> Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system I did try to implement partial-clone but failed Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate. It is painful for writing, but reading comments is quite fast and 99% is about loading.
- internetter 1y ago> Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate. Maybe, maybe not. Before 2024, my blog got <10k views/y. Then in 2024 it got close to 1 million (this year it will likely be 100k). Very hard to predict traffic thanks to hn and stuff!
- splitbrain 1y agoI was in the same boat and built my own commenting system. It has an importer for disqus (so you don't lose your old comments) and also imports Mastodon replies. https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comment_system https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comme...
- ggirelli 1y agoI tried we mentions for a while, but then switched to just POSSE (publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere). So the comments are moved to other platforms atm.
- ggirelli 1y ago*webmentions
- montebicyclelo 1y agoI did the same. I was sad to lose the comments, but the ads were awful and I don't particularly want someone elses ads / tracking on my hobby site. I switched to gisqus [1], which is powered by GitHub discussions, which seems to be working ok. (The site is hosted on GH pages so seems reasonable to also use GH discussions for the comments.) [1] https://giscus.app/ https://giscus.app/
- xenator 1y agoI blocked Disqus locally on my computer via /etc/hosts many years ago. Reason is very simply. Because comments as genre is almost useless.
- falcor84 1y ago> comments as genre is almost useless. Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
- npodbielski 1y agoYou are putting comments on HN right now. i guess not entirelly useless then?
- rkomorn 1y agoOP wrote "almost useless" which, by definition, is also "not entirely useless".
- npodbielski 1y agoYou are technically correct, best kind of correct.
- heresie-dabord 1y ago> putting comments on HN [...] not entirelly useless then? Comment systems are useful/effective when someone is paying the full cost of moderation.
- malcolmxxx 1y agoIf it weren't for the "almost," the commenter would be in serious trouble.
- sunaookami 1y agoRemoved Disqus from my website after getting huge spam waves (not the classic garbage spam but "real" comments, but for completely different sites, like they were intended for other sites but instead posted to mine. They were all from a few days old accounts). I wish I'd have used the built-in WordPress comments from the start but well, it was a different time back then. Related: I've used WordPress Jetpack Stats until they extorted every free website, no export possible. Would've cost me 200 € per year, that's more than I pay for my website. Switched to self-hosted Umami but 10 years of data just gone.
- thomashabets2 1y agoWhen the ads showed up I immediately put disqus loading behind a "load comments despite ads" button, and instead just had a static export of the comments loaded by default. But that's a temporary solution. Sure, I can code an in house comment system within an hour, but the real work is to combat spam. Because people (and now also disqus) suck.
- vivzkestrel 1y agoFor those of you stuck with this issue reading this, there is a nice open source commenting system I found on GitHub https://valine.js.org/en/index.html https://valine.js.org/en/index.html Here is another one https://docs.coralproject.net/ https://docs.coralproject.net/
- nsim 1y agoI've found https://remark42.com/ https://remark42.com/ works well with static sites, and has plenty of user login options. But, the solution I've been looking for/prototyping is one that lets people comment from the Fadiverse, so it will also double as a feed. Nothing to show yet, but one-day maybe.
- BoKKeR11 1y ago[dead]
- huijzer 1y agoI just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
- chistev 1y agoYea, it's what modern blogs do. The discussions happen on social media and platforms where they are shared
- notRobot 1y agoThis has disadvantages though! Often the threads on sites like HN/reddit get "archived" or lose traction and you cannot join the discussion if you don't happen to discover the article in the first few days of it getting published. In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose questions and start interesting conversations that do not have an expiration date on them. The discussion for the article can be found on the same webpage by readers, they don't have to go looking on external sites, most of which have terrible searchability and now require logins just to view content and can delete threads and valuable discussions arbitrarily. I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoCounterpoint, blog posts age; information or opinion from 10 years ago may no longer be accurate or reflect the author's held beliefs. Is it still worth discussing it then? That said, I run old fashioned forums and some older threads get revived there from time to time with new insights. Others get flagged up by copyright holders under DMCA takedown threats or bumped by spambots though.
- niutech 1y agoNot necessarily 10 years ago, you cannot comment on a HN post even from a month ago!
- noosphr 1y agoMailing lists are still the superior format. The barrier to entry is a feature and not a bug.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago[flagged]
- bell-cot 1y agoThe 1) Get Invited, and 2) Physically Attend barriers for parties are a lot higher than for most mailing lists.
- eviks 1y agoThe barriers to comfortable use are a bug, though
- noosphr 1y agoSounds like you need more Emacs in your life. This post was written in Emacs.
- account42 1y agoMailing lists work for something like an open source project where you have an ongoing relationship with the community. They are not suitable for one-off comments on a blog post. In particular, I'm not even sure how you could make it possible for a normal user using a standard mail client to reply to a comment that was posted before they came across the blog post.
- lloydjones 1y agoTry using a Bluesky-based solution so that everyone owns the content? I made Bluniversal Comments partly for this, but there are other Bluesky-based solutions out there if you prefer.
- aricooperdavis 1y agoUtterances: https://utteranc.es/ https://utteranc.es/
- amelius 1y ago> No lock-in. All data stored in GitHub issues. No lock-in, except for GitHub, I suppose.
- runxel 1y agoCame here to recommend that as well. Or just leave it. Nobody needs to comment on blog posts, really. :D
- cubefox 1y agoThat requires a GitHub account, which most readers on most blogs won't have. Moreover, I'm pretty sure most people (>50%) who would have commented, probably won't do it if it requires creating an account for an external service first. Maybe anonymous commenting by just solving some captcha is impossible nowadays because in practice all captchas get broken by spam bots immediately. Or maybe not. I would like to see evidence for that first before giving up and choosing a commenting solution which strictly requires an account.
- lutzh 1y agoI use Hyvor Talk - https://talk.hyvor.com https://talk.hyvor.com - for ad-free and privacy respecting commenting on my blog. I really wanted something that I can just use as a service, not host anything myself. But it's quite expensive. If I where to ditch it to save the money, I'd look into integrating Mastodon into the page, I saw somewhere that they used Mastodon as their comment system (it's basically a thread on Mastodon that is embedded in the blog page).
- edarchis 1y ago12€/month minimum, that's expensive. It's ok for a professional website with loads of comments but for my personal blog, I'd rather not have comments.
- daitangio 1y agoI keep using isso https://isso-comments.de/ https://isso-comments.de/ I installed it on my static blog very easily, and I own all the data. Also it is GDPR-compliant (because it provide hints on how to remove data like IPs) and it is very light. For me Disqus and similia are a dead end.
- npodbielski 1y agoLooks very nice. Thanks.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- edent 1y agoFor everyone saying "just have the comments on social networking sites" - that fragments the conversation, makes people sign up to a service if they want to comment, and exposes them to ads on 3rd party sites. You also get no control over the level of abuse, misinformation, and spam on those external sites. The joy of having comments on your own site is that you can moderate the bad-faith discussions and curate a friendly / helpful atmosphere. Yes, you need a small database to receive and serve comments. Spam is mostly taken care of with a hidden field. It is great to build a community of commenters who want to offer their thoughts.
- krapp 1y agoUnless you're famous enough that everything you post gets to the top of Google, no one will read your content unless you post it to a social media platform with a curated audience. Literally no one but bots and AI crawlers. I mean, you have a whole list of crossposting links at the bottom of your own blog posts, including to HN and Mastodon, so you clearly understand. You wouldn't lose anything by limiting comments to just those curated social media platforms except spam and bots.
- edent 1y agoLooking through my recent comments, the majority are from people filling in the box on my posts. So, yes, I would lose a lot if I switched them off. You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog. That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.
- krapp 1y agoI was actually going to suggest importing comments from a Fediverse account like Mastodon as a solution to that problem but I saw you were already doing something along those lines. I'm trying Mastodon comments on my own blog, that I'm not posting here because it isn't really ready, from my own Mastodon account. I'd never even consider public comments anymore, it just seems like inviting trouble.
- aa_is_op 1y agoDisqus has been dead for years. Haven't seen it used on a legitimate blog or news sites since it was bought out. This was kinda expected. It's the Digg rot at work.
- ksec 1y agoEdit: And for other similar services, blocking ads or using DNS solution that block ads it will refuse to load the comment section. It is now 2025, Unless it is an extremely popular site where every blog post has hundreds of comments. For most blogs hosting your own comment section shouldn't even be a rounding error or expensive. Why do we still have to put up with Disqus? Blog like Michael Tsai [1] do it just fine. You submit a comment it render the page on server. [1]https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/29/ios-26-0-1-and-ipados-26-0-1/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/29/ios-26-0-1-and-ipados-26-...
- bilekas 1y agoIt's disgusting what the internet has become, in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads, not that that would justify it. And then you have companies like Google who will punish you intentionally for using tools to reduce the amount of spam you're exposed to on your own device. We need a better model of financially supporting websites and services, not all companies are simply greedy, there are bills to pay, but it's gotten ridiculous.
- kokada 1y ago> in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads Yes. I think Disqus is trying to get money from the long tail of blogs that enabled Disqus in the past and never bothered to look up for the policy changes. I am sure they started with small, non-invasive ads and eventually got bigger until we get in the situation that we are today. So even if someone enabled Disqus in the past because they seemed a reasonable system a few years ago, their blogs are now an ad farm and the original owner may have zero idea since it is a blog they abandoned years ago. Heck, my old Wordpress blog that I don't even remember the password is probably an ad field nowadays that is probably generating pennies for one of those companies.
- analog8374 1y agoIt's like that episode of black mirror where if he shut his eyes to the ads it would start yelling at him.
- aubanel 1y agoGiscus is a cool comments management solution vis Github: It lets users auth through Github then posts comments as discussions under your repo. We use it here for instance: https://predibench.com/models https://predibench.com/models
- thiht 1y agoI like giscus too, it’s pretty neat. It makes a lot of sense for tech blogs since the audience likely already has a GitHub account. And the comments being hosted in discussions makes them easy to backup in case you want to roll your own comment system someday.
- abdullahkhwaja 1y agoI have an email address for comments at the bottom of my blog posts. If they can write me an email and it's something that contributes to the discussion, I'll include it in a comments section at the bottom of the post. For bigger discussions, cross-post to social is the way to go.
- squeedles 1y agoThat's exactly how periodicals worked for a hundred years. A letter to the editor that is published in the next edition. That's how I always mentally viewed blogs and expected most niche sites to eventually do that. In fact, a local "neat things" blog was successfully doing that for quite a while.
- Shugyousha 1y agoI like the idea of linking to a public inbox (i.e. an email inbox whose contents can be checked from the web). That grants people an easy way to discuss content and to check any prior discussion, if any. Something like https://lists.sr.ht/~shugyousha/public-inbox https://lists.sr.ht/~shugyousha/public-inbox for example.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoI’m in the process of converting a Wordpress blog to a static site. We did have significant comment traffic back in the day so I did look into how to maintain comment functionality. I found Comentario https://docs.comentario.app/en/ https://docs.comentario.app/en/ which is a standalone comments engine that can be self-hosted and linked to the blog page. Single stand alone Go executable, SQLite database - seems dead simple and has built-in ways to migrate Wordpress comments. Still, since we do not get that many comments these days, I’ll probably postpone it and just provide a static render of existing / historical comments which does have value for archival and discussion purposes.
- blakesterz 1y agoWhat are you using to convert Wordpress to static pages?
- loloquwowndueo 1y agohttps://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo It dumps all pages and articles as markdown with most Wordpress metadata as front matter metadata, and all comments in a separate yaml file which can be processed as needed. It creates a minimal theme with the necessary templates to do a basic static render of the content. It does need some theme and template tweaking to match Wordpress url structure and ensure all pages end up in the same url/permalink. I also used a Wordpress hugo exporter plug-in about 3 years ago - worked mostly the same. Using Hugo still allows me to more easily add content to the site while maintaining a consistent templating and design. I also experimented with doing a simple static dump of html as generated by Wordpress - I tried two ways, using wget —-mirror which kinda worked but generated a lot of redundant pages, and a Wordpress plugin called “simply static” which was supposed to do something similar but in the end didn’t work. In the end I decided against the static dump because it would have entirely “frozen” the site in time - I did want the ability to add content down the line; or change the design without having to modify the content significantly. Archiving sites verbatim is best left to the experts at archive.org :)
- deadbabe 1y agoIf people want to write comments provide an email address to send comments to. You will get better comments this way.
- mrweasel 1y agoOther than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web. When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
- lupusreal 1y agoThe ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.
- mrweasel 1y agoThat's a really good point. If the problem is the scammers, and they buy ads, then why won't they let us report it?
- rchaud 1y agoBecause they don't want to drive off business.
- jrmg 1y agoFor me, almost every YouTube ad is a scam. Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!). I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care. FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?
- antonyh 1y agoI used to use Disqus on my blog a long time ago, but dropped it with one of the many reboots. Having comments on a blog still seems like a good idea but I'm still half minds over on-page vs fediverse-based discussion, or maybe even both. Spam is a constant problem. One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
- conradfr 1y agoWow thanks for the reminder! I have a small side project [0] with Disqus and got the email there would be ads but didn't think to check it out and due to ublock I was kind of oblivious to how they looked. Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png The size of it, above the comments (and under as well of course). That is madness. I'll have to check some of the alternative listed in here. I could just code it but I really don't want to deal with spam and moderation... Or maybe I'll remove comments altogether. [0] https://abx.funkybits.fr/ https://abx.funkybits.fr/
- dingdingdang 1y agoAll centralized services will eventually present a variant of this disease and indeed almost all are already. Actual baseline improvement in technology requires fully decentralized software similar to bittorrent and it's ilk imho.
- BatteryMountain 1y agoFor those on the consuming side, Privacy Badger in Firefox has been blocking disqus for years without fail if you don't like seeing comments on sites.
- jwr 1y agoEnshittification is everywhere, unless you own your stuff. I know it's easier to use a third-party service, but please, consider hosting your own content to keep full control over it.
- AznHisoka 1y agoDoes hosting it in wordpress count?
- deafpolygon 1y agoI won't have anything to do with ads, on principle- I realize this removes a potential income stream for me, but I don't care. It is revolting how riddled the default web view is with advertisement and that the only way to browse sanely, you must install an adblocker.
- a1r 1y agoIf you are a small personal site, you can request a free upgrade to the Plus version (which can remove ads) by emailing publisher-success@disqus.com and asking. I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days. This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.
- bbor 1y agoI became “blind” to what the web is really like for most users. I’ve tried to keep this blog minimalist - a clean place to find answers. Those ads not only ruin that experience; they trample privacy too I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: the free and open internet died decades ago and is being propped up in Google’s yard as a scarecrow against public outrage. Online display advertising is a scam at best — it has to be terrible, because it’s just not very effective otherwise. If you have any recommendations for alternative commenting systems (especially those that respect privacy or are self-hosted), I’d love to hear them! I’ve heard great things about ATProto comments (aka “comments through BlueSky”), tho that’s obviously more setup. But this might not be the guy for it; pretty funny to see “hit me up on X” right next to calls for privacy, self-hosting, and authorial-control…
- 4laska 1y ago[dead]
- Raed667 1y ago100$ / year for comments ? I'm guessing this is not aimed at small blogs with a couple of posts a year
- delirehberi 1y agoI stopped to use disqus a long time ago. Instead I am using hugo2nostr to publish my blog post on nostr network. So, all nostr users can comment in their clients. https://github.com/delirehberi/hugo2nostr https://github.com/delirehberi/hugo2nostr
- echelon 1y agoHow big is the nostr network? Is it peer to peer instead of federated?
- delirehberi 1y agoNope, its working over relays and Nostr network growing faster than federation network. You can get more details on official site: nostr.org
- echelon 1y agoThat's the next best thing to P2P. I really like this design. I'll have to dive in sometime. This interests me in a way that Mastodon and BlueSky do not.
- pwillia7 1y agoI was so hopeful for Cactus.chat built on matrix, but like all products built on the matrix protocol, you have to follow their mantra of being unusable and undiscoverable. The main page for cactus chat even quit hosting the JS file and none of the maintainers think that's a problem lol. Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog. https://cactus.chat/ https://cactus.chat/
- zenmac 1y agoHmmm, wouldn't it just be easier to make a new room for a new blog and just call it directly from the web client end? Not e2ee style to support more clients?
- wateralien 1y agoA comment system on top of the AT Protocol seems like the way to go.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FooBarWidget 1y agoI had a similar incident with Disqus. But I didn't even know they were showing ads on my website because I had Adblock enabled. Until a user without adblock emailed me. facepalm
- jrmg 1y agoI like Isso: https://isso-comments.de/ https://isso-comments.de/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- franksvalli 1y agoA few years back I noticed something similar and had to find an alternative, which I found in Commento, which is now unfortunately abandoned: https://www.davidbcalhoun.com/2020/ditching-disqus-migrating-away-since-it-has-become-a-monster/ https://www.davidbcalhoun.com/2020/ditching-disqus-migrating... I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...
- KajMagnus 1y agoThen you might find Talkyard interesting: https://blog-comments.talkyard.io https://blog-comments.talkyard.io — reminds of Disqus, in that it's threaded, best first (optionally). (I'm developing it.) > showing some CORS error In my case, I found it annoying when cookies gradually stopped working, and eventually I had to make the software use custom HTTP headers instead of cookies. > Seems that mostly spammers comment The more interesting the contents of the blog is, the more real humans will like it and post comments? (if they can find it) But a "Our company posts something each day, even if nothing has happened" blog, or AI fluff, attracts only spammers?
- erikig 1y agoAs far as alternatives go, there was an interesting post a few weeks ago on using Bluesky as a commenting platform. It improves discoverability and adds a social aspect to comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164 I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
- m-hodges 1y agoThere are similar¹𝄒²𝄒³ ideas for Mastodon / ActivityPub: ¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/ ² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/ https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/ ³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
- hoistbypetard 1y agoI haven't tried them on my own blog yet, but on blogs I read, both the Bluesky comments you linked and this mastodon comment system: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta... have been pleasant.
- sorcercode 1y agohere's a similar implementation for Bluesky that I whipped up sometime back. https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/ https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/ I like my implementation cause it blends really well with the blog making it looks almost native. transferring the burden of maintenance - curation to a social media platform (and a slightly more open one to boot) has been a complete win.
- louwrentius 1y agoBased on this article, I decided to remove comments from my blog as I was using Disqus too. I liked the comments, they were infrequent and OK, but I'm not going to add an alternative, maybe in the future when I feel like it.
- shark1 1y agoDisqusting is the copious amount of trackers they inject in the websites. For small websites a good start is to get comments by email, publishing only the ones that adds value to the article or conversation. Why? Because we have lots of noise done by social media. A way of curating the comments increase the quality of the website. If the website gets traction, than it's good to consider a tool to facilitate the commenting and moderation.
- lioeters 1y ago> Disqusting Bravo for this banger of a new word.
- capestart 1y ago[dead]
- timpera 1y agoYou still need comments on your blog. I hate having to log in to Twitter or HN to leave a comment.
- redbell 1y ago> With this post, I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse, and frankly, they were profiting off my work and my visitor’s data. Ironically, if you look at the screenshot, just below the comments' section, you will read: 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data'. Seriously?! You are already torturing my visitors by throwing many ads, at the same time, on their faces. How can I trust you? Also, what drives me cra*y the most about online Ads is that they are random and have no relation with the content of the page I am looking at. Oftentimes, they went extremely far by showing what I consider near explicit content.
- awithrow 1y agoThe 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data' buttons are still part of the Disqus wodget
- jasoneckert 1y agoWhen I was evaluating ways to add comments to my blog on GitHub Pages, I quickly passed by Disqus because it was a 3rd party service that I didn't trust for reasons like this. Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.
- cgsmith 1y agoI wish there was a Git way of commenting even anonymously (not necessarily without auth). Then a site like this, written with Hugo, could keep all the comments and the moderation/spam could be built in with a GitHub authorization.
- kakarot253 1y agoYou can use github for comments, I had implemented it on my blog earlier. Currently removed the section completly. Here is an example on this site. https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
- est 1y agoThe catch: OAuth login will "Act on your behalf" Which means complete control of all your github account.
- ChoGGi 1y agoThe Web would be a better place without advertising. It might be smaller as well, but that's fine by me.
- analog8374 1y agoI think they'd just increase the cost of everything until you needed advertising, then. That's a trick they use a lot.
- Apreche 1y agoI strongly recommend not having comments on your blog at all.
- jmmv 1y agoSame here. I removed Disqus a while back due to how obnoxious it became. Then, I built my own commenting platform and, while it was a fun thing to do... I think it's worthless. People don't comment on blogs anymore, and when they do, the value is too low. Discussions happen elsewhere now. I've been tempted to just remove the comments altogether but haven't gotten to it.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI forget what HN linked blog post it was, but I noticed a bunch of ads on a website, and realized it was all from Disqus. It's a shame because it looked like the website owner had them setup.
- RajT88 1y agoThese look like standard disqus ads. Which is to say - like you see when you scroll to the bottom of a Breitbart article. I would totally agree that this makes your site look like an armpit of the internet, but also - there was a way to figure out that this would happen ahead of time. Google Ads last I checked weren't nearly as bad, but even these were prone to scams and malvertising campaigns on sites I've frequented.
- Zak 1y agoI use Mastodon for comments on one of my sites using a slightly modified version of the code featured here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-static-blog-with-mastodon/ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta... As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.
- sachac 1y agoI took Disqus out of my blog back in March. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Disqus had started to feel quite icky. I exported 18 years of comments from Disqus and wrote a little code to include them in my static site generation process. Now I just stick a footer with an e-mail link (and Mastodon thread link, if there is one) on each of my posts on the website and RSS feed. I get few comments, anyway, so I'd rather not subject everyone to all that tracking and ad nonsense.
- rchaud 1y agoThere was once a time when advertisers had to show some creativity in their ad copy to develop brand recognition and stay within the editorial guidelines of magazines and newspapers. Online "targeted" ads eliminated the gatekeeper in favour of a free-for-all where shady companies are encouraged to hide their identities so they can simply advertise under a different name when their ad account eventually gets banned. 20 years ago I was seeing scam ads for "mail order brides", "free iPods" and "legal buds", today its crypto scams , political spam and misinformation.
- noirscape 1y agoIn terms of blogs, for selfhosting comments, the main ones that seems interesting for selfhosted setups are probably remark42[0] and utterance.es[1]. Remark42 is a low barrier Disqus clone with social logins (as well as just plain usernames) that also makes it fairly easy for users to bulk export their own data (as well as delete I think?), which ought to take care of most GDPR stuff. Utterance.es is GitHub issues backed comments, which is an inherent barrier to commenting, but YMMV if that's an actual problem (generally the value of unbarred comment sections is abysmal). Like remark42, it's open source, but you're relying on a third party's servers. [0]: https://github.com/umputun/remark42 https://github.com/umputun/remark42 [1]: https://utteranc.es/ https://utteranc.es/
- opengrass 1y ago[dead]
- BobAliceInATree 1y agoYou're using an free tier supported by ads, what would you expect? Either pay the money they ask if it's worth having comments, or build your own system.
- lukev 1y agoI've been waiting for someone to build a Disqus alternative on ATProto (the protocol behind Bluesky, Blacksky, Skylight, etc.) Posts could show both under the article (like "normal" comments) and for aggregated discussion on Bluesky / any other app that renders Bluesky posts. And you'd get "free" moderation (at least for basic stuff) from the Bluesky mod team.
- KerrAvon 1y agoProof of concept: the best blog commenting system I’ve seen uses ActivityPub (to integrate with Mastodon). It’s utterly easy to use, and pretty seamless. I don’t know what it’s called or if there’s more than one implementation, but you can see this in action at jwz’s site and a handful of others.
- graerg 1y agoThere was a post on HN a few weeks ago about natalie.sh replacing blog comments with Bluesky threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164 I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/ https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
- EGreg 1y agoAh, color me shocked that capitalism leads to enshittification over time. Why would people embed a for-profit third party platform in their Web 1.0 site and let them do whatever they want? Because they don’t have the software to do “social” Web 2.0 stuff themselves. Perhaps there should be an open source alternative. Why isn’t there one by now?
- whatamidoingyo 1y agoSame. I bit and upgraded my account to get rid of the ads. But it still didn't feel great using their software, so I just built commenting into my site after switching from static site to a fullstack setup. They made it difficult to cancel the subscription. I had to send an email to cancel it... like what?
- ftchd 1y agoI don't know why but I never commented on a disqus blog, ever. Something about it makes me feel like the author didn't care too much about comment and gave us the IKEA version. No issues with it, works well, but it feels sterile.
- Coeur 1y agoThat's a great step forward. But: he says he wants his users to be free from unwanted tracking, yet still has google analytics installed.
- liampulles 1y agoFrom conception, I've never wanted a comment section on my blog. I just put a line that in effect says "if you want to comment, you can send me an email at xyz". If you are coming to a blog post of mine that has been shared to you, my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section. I am aiding you by not even putting a comment section there. I realize there is a slim chance for there to be enlightening conversation in a blog comment section - but that is not what my blog is for. You are better served doing that here on HN or a more dedicated forum. Here it can be be more visible for others, for people who want to read discourse.
- dominicrose 1y agoIt's a bit sad that content creators, from individuals to big companies, have to (or at least feel like they have to) disable comments on their content, wether it's a video or an article. Sending an e-mail is not the same thing, it's like Youtube removing the unlike button count and instead sending the info only to the creator. This doesn't apply to your blog, but I've seen low quality or misleading content without a possibility to comment. Even worse: scams that include a fake comment section.
- esjeon 1y agoI agree. Your blog represents you, so it must be fully curated by you. Others' opinions, you can always pull them manually into your website whenever necessary in whatever method and format you prefer. There's no reason to be bothered by random strangers injecting random things onto your own persona. They can always go to other communities if they seriously want to talk about your posts.
- fluoridation 1y ago>my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section Pfft. Half of the fun on the Internet is arguing with people about what other people said. I like to link to this blog post with over 500 replies about a constructivist who doesn't believe in the well-definedness of real numbers and shows up in the comments to respond to people: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-the-field-axioms/ http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th... I really do not believe that blog would be better by not having comments enabled.
- renewiltord 1y agoHaha lol it's a chumbox. That's wild.
- drnick1 1y ago"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like." It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years. Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective. Second, Pi-hole is kind of heavy for what it does; you can accomplish the same by loading a blacklist directly to the config file of Unbound/Bind/Dnsmasq.
- jayd16 1y agoIs that right? Mobile is like 60% of the web traffic and they don't really have popular and effective ad blocking.
- 1dom 1y agoThere are native, easily accessible ublock variations for Firefox for Windows, Linux and Android. A lot of nerds also have some form of private overlay network with default DNS to adguard or pihole or similar, again, making for identical adblock experience on all platforms.
- jayd16 1y agoYes and it seems great but there's no denying its not widely used.
- fluoridation 1y agoOkay, but what does it matter? The options exist for people who want them, nonetheless.
- jayd16 1y agoBecause were talking about the current usage of ad blockers, not what options exist.
- kens 1y agoI encountered a similar problem with blog subscription services: I was using "follow.it", which would handle subscriptions and send out an email when I have a new article. It worked fine until follow.it went spammy a few months ago, switching to emails that were mostly objectionable junk ads. Does anyone have advice for handling blog subscriptions? I'm thinking of switching to Kit, which has a free tier that seems reasonable. Paid services seem to start at $50/month, which is way more than I want to spend. (Originally, Blogger handled subscriptions automatically, but Google removed that feature.)
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- justsid 1y agoRSS
- kens 1y agoI provide RSS but many people want to subscribe to my blog through email. So I'm looking for an email-based subscription solution in addition to RSS.
- wltr 1y agoThis constant difference between the original title and its censored version contributes into the whole impression (this, plus the lack of any moderation log) into the whole community to be very much censored and demotivates me to be here. Which isn’t a bad thing for me personally, the domination part, but the censoring part for no reason is quite disturbing. Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.
- croisillon 1y agoi agree with that and it keeps happening without sense or meaning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141483
- wltr 1y agoThat, and aren’t we at the promoted publications at the front page yet?
- garganzol 1y agoIn this case, keeping the original title would allow you to be better connected to the reality. But this is not what some actors want - they want you to stay disconnected, and thus easily "influenced", to put it mildly.
- wltr 1y agoSometimes my iPhone changes words in a way I don’t see it before I press the reply button, it feels. The word domination had to be motivation.
- socalgal2 1y agoI have disqus on several sites. No ads so shrug? Having written my own multiple times and used several others before disqus I’m unlikely to switch unless the new thing is super compelling and I believe it will stick around. Spam is hard to deal with. Akismet fails miserably for me. disqus has the fact they can track users across sites. Spam one site and you’re off all sites.
- tonymet 1y agoI removed Disqus 7 years ago when I noticed their Javascript+HTML embeds ballooned my 75kb static blog into 3mb+ with sluggish loading times. It also failed every Performance test like Chrome Devtools Lighthouse Perf Tab. We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
- PaulHoule 1y agoWith very little fanfare Google added an "AI Mode" button next to the search which adds a much more competent question answering engine than those awful summaries that appear at the top of most searches. (On a yes/no question they often give different answers and the "AI Mode" is right) On one hand there is the impact on web sites which will lose more traffic but on the other hand this will kill the trash ad networks (maybe good in many senses but problematic from antitrust perspective) and also also a lot of trash sites that dominate search results. No more fandom, no more Forbes. The trouble is that the web accessible from Google has been so bad for so long that people aren't going to miss it. For instance I've been playing the game Arknights where there is a pool of 366 'operators' of which every player has a subset so it is difficult to give a walkthrough that works for everyone and you often have questions like 'Should I use resources to upgrade operator A, B, C or D?' and AI Mode gives me a good explanation of the tradeoffs -- the alternative is Fandom sites which have endless incomprehensible tables or spending hours surfing Reddit where half of the opinions are off the wall, complete garbage ads are blended seamlessly into the content and god forbid I accidentally hit the mouse button anywhere because I get navigated somewhere completely random which might be NSFW. Similarly I was helping my son look for a rackmount MIDI synth and you could spend hours watching people drone on about it on YouTube or looking at Ebay listings or other sources or you could get some good choices that are well explained and have some links. The "dead internet" is finally going to die.
- anagogistis 1y agoThanks! I just disabled it on my blog after reading your post. I hadn’t realized how bad it was because of my ad blocker. Truly disqus-ting...
- dross 1y agoI didn't notice this problem, but then I realized that as I'm using Brave browser ads might be blocked by default. So I tried in Chrome and still no ads. I'm using Jekyll for my blog so I wonder what's saving me from this issue. Example:https://dalevross.rosssquared.org/blog/2013/08/16/pi-lovin.html https://dalevross.rosssquared.org/blog/2013/08/16/pi-lovin.h... If anyone is able to confirm that they're not seeing ads either, I would be grateful.
- fortran77 1y agoThere are a number of websites I like, like https://quoteinvestigator.com/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/ but I'll never send links to them to people that I think may not have ad blockers (my Mom on her iPad, etc) because the non-adblocked experience is so awful.
- alltheseas 1y agoImproving performance, and removing ads is the way to go. There is FOSS option built on nostr you could explore called nocomment. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment. License is public domain.
- tayloramurphy 1y agoI've enjoyed the comment system on https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/oss-maintainers-guide-to-saying-no https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/oss-maintainers-guide-to-saying-... which seems to pull from Hacker News and Bluesky when the author has posted the article directly.
- lo_fye 1y agoI don't think anyone is surprised by this.
- didip 1y agoI didn't realize Disqus is still alive. Yeah, there's no use in embedding things like this if it doesn't even bring in the traffic. You gained 0 and they gained 100.
- CIPHERSTONE 1y agoI suspect 99.5% of blogs like this don't make any appreciable amount of money from ads. Which begs the question, why even do it? If it cheapens your readers experience and you are not making significant money from it, just don't do it at all. Everyone thinks their blog will make money, few do.
- SpicyUme 1y agoMaybe I'm just lucky but looking at special interest blogs I appreciate the comments from other users/experts/makers. Diqus is the latest in a string of commenting tool and they all seem to have issues over time. A favorite blog resource of mine got nuked after the comments were filled with spam, and possibly used to hack the site. Unfortunately the blog was a collection of years of specific experiences in places with very little other information for that activity. I've talked to the owner about getting information in the years since and he's been helpful, but building the site back would take too long for him, so it's mostly gone. The comments there were useful for updates from people who visited those locations, or found alternate routes/approaches.
- eviks 1y agoWhere in the blog did you get the info that the author wanted to make ad money off their blog?
- dbishai 1y agoShameless plug but I built https://blogmate.io/ https://blogmate.io/ with Elixir and Phoenix LiveView for this exact problem.
- tracker1 1y agoI'd be surprised if there wasn't a self-hostable, open-source JS injected comment system similar to Discus available. For me, I'd like to stay as close to SSG as possible for blogs, and only load comments on-demand for users. Just to give the best initial impression of the content. One of these days I'll finish out my setup and get back into blogging.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoBlogs with comments should just be forums.
- drw85 1y agoI guess most people here use adblockers, i do too. But occasionally, i have to use the internet without one and i am absolutely shocked. Ads don't just show things, they forward you to websites that vibrate your phone and claim you won prizes on ebay, amazon, or apple. Those ads and scripts are on completely legitimate newspapers, ebay, etc. It's like those companies never use their own product or actually pay attention to what's happening. The internet without adblockers is largely unusable and dangerous.