Disqus, a dark commenting system

Discourse is quite popular, I see it regularly on new sites. Though it doesn't really fit the same niche as disqus.

This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.

The use case I was thinking of for individuals is more like paying a nickel to read an article. I'm not really familiar with AML/KYC requirements, but I'm not sure I see the need. I would imagine most people would want a basic account so they could revisit paid content later. Any laundering would get caught looking at your business' finances (what you do with the money) or tracking crypto accounts in a more traditional manor.

I've used cryptocurrencies here and there for online services (merch and digital services) and don't remember any additional scrutiny. I reasons I had in mind are the confusion and overhead of using crypto for the average person.

I guess if there were some regulatory requirements in a made-up "ideal" scenario, I would see it mirroring existing banks and credit cards where your source wallet was from a "sanctioned" account to track location for local taxes and whatnot. The onus wouldn't be put on the business other than having an allowlist (by prefix or something)--but none of that exists. I would think a lot more structure an institutions would need to exist anyway to make cryptocurrencies more palatable to individuals.

I've been around long enough to have seen how comments on the Web emerged from innocuous guest books and a feature in personal blogging and ended up being un-ironically slapped to any 5-line piece of content.

Disqus and their ilk exist because of one reason only: convenience.

(a) You don't need to install software and a database to store comments, (b) you don't need to maintain that software or worry that it's an attack vector (c) you don't need to pay for hosting and (d) you don't need to worry about comment spam.

While that's all valid, I feel a moral question lurks beneath the surface.

If you host a website, you are establishing a bond of trust with visitors. And your visitors can and will hold you accountable for the experience you offer. A foundational principle and the promise of the Web was (and still is) that information is shared in an equitable fashion. That doesn't mean you have to serve content for free or peanuts (there's nothing wrong with paid content). It does mean that no matter what you do, you can never outsource responsibility over what you put on line.

This pertains both to functionality as well as the content itself.

Companies like Disqus have jumped into a niche: removing the costs (time / money) of self-hosting and managing comments. It's totally fine to pull their infrastructure into your own website via - ultimately - an tag. But you do have a responsibility towards your visitors to do your due diligence and assert that the services you're relying on won't compromise your own bond of trust with your visitors.

Asserting that due diligence is a big issue. Not everyone is doing this, and enough companies and individuals will shirk their responsibility for the sake of convenience and costs. Over the past 15 years, the Web has become riddled with embeds, widgets and iframes. It's not just Disqus, it's literally any copy-and-paste code which people add in matter-of-factly without considering the consequences.

WordPress, for instance, offers oembed support out of the box. Drop in a YouTube or Instagram link and it will automagically transform into a widget. Extremely convenient, but it's an open door for trackers.

https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/

This leaves you, as a visitor of websites, in a bind: you can't trust websites to not have a tracker

In the EU, that's where the GDPR does make a difference. If you want to be compliant, you will need to either jump through several technical hoops to give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of trackers... or you simply stop relying on third-party embeds all together since they now pose a legal liability.

In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment box on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you provide them with insights in how you manage their comments.

The GDPR is actively enforced and companies and individuals do get fined for not adhering to the rules.

https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights

We forget, the main reason we post a comment is to be read by others. So there's nothing wrong because it is "you" wrote the comments and it is "you". Sure you already read their Terms of Service (ToS) before embedding their product in your website. There is no free lunch as there are some costs to develop and maintain a product. If you are a coder, develop your own commenting system is not hard. They just do what they do for survival, like everybody else.