I know that, of course. The reality is that many people just use whatever their blogging engine ships, which often involves asking for an e-mail address and wai

I know that, of course. The reality is that many people just use whatever their blogging engine ships, which often involves asking for an e-mail address and waiting until your comment has been (manually) approved by the author. The Hacker News commenting system doesn't bother me as much, because I only need to sign up once. For self-hosted comment sections I have to either "sign up" for every individual blog I want to comment on or tie my real identity to my comments for convenience. That's something I'd rather not do and which isn't necessary at all. On top of that, Hacker News provides a nice "threads" page where I can track who replied to my comment. With a self-hosted comment section I'd have to check the comments section of several blogs constantly or subscribe to some kind of comment RSS feed, which is not ideal at all. Hacker news can be substituted for "A service like Disqus" in the last two paragraphs. For these reasons, I might decide to not reply at all, even though I might have something relevant and interesting to say. I'd like to hear your reasons for hosting comments yourself though, as I can't think of any good ones myself that render the arguments I laid out here irrelevant.