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Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

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Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#81

Post by warrenm »

tjansen wrote: post #46
gregdoesit wrote: post #5

I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…

Maybe that's an idea for a product: find discussions on HN, Twitter, Reddit, FB etc about your blog post and embed them on the blog where you would usually see the comments. Not sure how big the market is, but...

There are ways to automatically grab feeds of specific hashtags on Twitter

Maybe post your blog with something "unique[ish]"?

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#82

Post by brycewray »

account42 wrote: post #54

Part of it might be due to the rise of static site generators which almost by definition do not directly support comments without having an additional non-static service, external or not. Even just having an endpoint to submit comments seems a lot to ask when the site otherwise doesn't even need a database. Ultimately I think the need/want for discussion is better served by different websites rather than asking every…

There are a number of commenting solutions that work with SSGs. Two in particular which may appeal to the HN crowd are Utterances[0] and the more recent giscus[1], each of which uses GitHub services (GitHub Issues and GitHub Discussions, respectively). Assuming your commenters don't have a problem with having to log into GitHub to say something, either of these will work. I've also written in the past[2] about some other SSG-friendly possibilities.

[0]: https://utteranc.es/

[1]: https://giscus.app/

[2]: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2020/10/conversation-piece/

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#83

Post by liotier »

account42 wrote: post #57
liotier wrote: post #17

Running any public forum mostly means moderation. Trawling through hundreds of spam comments that got through the filters, to find the occasional jewel, ceased to motivate me. Should we be sad that discussion about a piece doesn't occur centrally, or is it actually better that several discussions occur - each of them with their hosting venue's specific tone ? As someone else mentioned, webmentions might bring the bes…

Do you know if webmentions do anything against spam or if they just defer that problem until the technology gets popular enough for spammers to catch on?

I have not found webmentions-specific antispam processes. I suppose that, a whitelist/greylist/blacklist approach at host level might keep it manageable: if a social host can't moderate its spammers, then it is not worth accepting traffic from.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#84

Post by cypher_31 »

donatj wrote: post #76
notacoward wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books don't have comment sections either. Neither do plays. Do you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play does so only because of ego? Some do, surely, but many just have information or insight or entertainment they want to make available to others. In some subset of those cases, the incremental value of adding comments is nil (or worse). Maybe it's those who do crave comments who are blogging out of nothi…

> Do you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play does so only because of ego Yes. Especially in this day and age when there are other options, like a Blog , with a comment section. You write a book because you want something to put on your resume. A notable exception here would be Andy Weir's "The Martian", which started as a blog, with a comment section, where he received many corrections as he developed i…

Just as a counter point, I wrote a book because I wanted to prove to myself that I could. It will probably never see the light of day, but I did it and I found the experience valuable. But, maybe you are just talking about people who sell books? In that case, I think the majority of authors are not getting rich, famous, or hired for the number of books on their resume.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#85

Post by amerkhalid »

turoczy wrote: post #68
gregdoesit wrote: post #5

I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics. I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging. The reason was spam, noise and little value add. Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20% of the co…

I've been blogging in some form or another since the late 90s, but consistently on the same blog for going on 15 years. Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My motivation had less to do with spam. (I'm on WordPress and it does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than…

I have been blogging for twenty years, unfortunately, not on same blog though. But I was also using WordPress and comment spam was virtually nil.

For me the big issues was lack of comments. It made my blogs look like no one was reading them. So I turned off comments.

Then I realized all other functionality of WordPress was geared towards businesses or marketers. I don't need every blog post to automatically spam all of my social networks. It was just extra work to keep WordPress secure and updated.

So I moved to static site generator, and if I want to share certain posts, I will manually share with friends. Much better engagement and comments this way.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#86

Post by warrenm »

I used to like blog comments

But I now [mostly] hate them

And not just for the spam aspect (though it's a factor)

It's that comments are going to happen where they happen

And some platforms (reddit, hn, twitter, etc) are, quite frankly, better places than trying to selfishly centralize it all to my blog

The audience reach elsewhere is millions of times more than on my blog

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#87

Post by ChrisArchitect »

Commenting hasn't just been pushed to twitter or ...email(?) -- it's been pushed here!

Yes, due to insane spam and bots and difficulty of managing/moderating, but I appreciate companies and bloggers close to this site/who are fans or at least frequent, including a thread link to their bigger posts here. CloudFlare sticks out

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#88

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

rasen58 wrote: post #59
marginalia_nu wrote: post #39

Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets. Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior. If you have something substantive to say,…

Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?

HN have a different approach. Here in HN, new accounts are restricted to comments only, the restriction will slowly remove as the account get older and have amble "karma" (sorry, I am not sure what term for here in HN) then they will gain the ability to vote later on.

Also HN prevents people from voting on parent comments if they respond to it. So if they commented it, then it is considered as voted. If they up/downvote the comment and then posted a response to that, HN automatically replace the vote to comment response.

I like this approach because it is a great way to have engaging discussion than trying to drive meaningless and irrelevant comments as top comments.

Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

#90

Post by klibertp »

donatj wrote: post #61

Blogging without comments is weird to me. I have a small handful of blogs, one of which just turned 21 years old, and the reason I blog is the comments. I want to hear what others have to say. I want to know when I am wrong. I am not an unquestionable pillar of truth, I am a dude that finds things interesting and wants to talk about it. I want to learn more, and the collective peanut gallery inevitably knows more tha…

> and the reason I blog is the comments. [...] I have no idea why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.

I would have not written any blog post in a decade if that (EDIT: comments instead of ego) was my motivation. My blog features a grand total of 5 comments in 12 years. Writing my posts takes a lot of time and effort - they are very (by today's standards) technical, and very long, and no matter where I try posting them to get any kind of attention, I just don't get it. I decided not to care - I now write posts for a reason similar to what motivates people to sail through Atlantic alone or run a marathon. It just feels really good to get to the finishing line. But it's also a fact that I would have been writing way more often if I knew the posts will be read and discussed; I'm just finding my ways to emotionally cope with the knowledge that they won't.

Yeah, I'm just grumbling, so don't mind me. Still, I'm jealous. Being able to use comments as a reason for writing would be great. So, be happy that you can do this!

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