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Disqus, a dark commenting system

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Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#151
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of alternatives exist - YouTube Premium ( which also gets you YouTube with no adds, on top of YouTube Music), Amazon Music, Apple Music, and iirc pandora, SoundCloud? I haven't compared prices.

Can't really suggest YT as an alternative to a monopoly

Is either company a monopoly in "music streaming" if they're both viable alternatives?

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#152
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've seen it used to operate as footer comments on blogs.

Dgraph Labs uses it. I am a bit ambivalent about it. For example: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/putting-it-all-together-part1/

Here it says 7 comments. But you only get to see one. You have to click into the discourse post to get more. This is due to Discourse's threading model. 6 of the comments were replying to the one on the blog post itself.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#153
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive - you're looking at some - but it's wrapped up in and presented on for-profit sites. The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.

"The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive" Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes such geek_at says he's had, others have pointed out that self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This stands to reason and it's a damn shame. It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common universally-wide…

Ooh, a taxonomy! Haven't had one of those since the death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

(these are popular with library nerds, but in practice the public wants a constant feed of links + discussion in some form, whether that's slashdot, digg, reddit, or twitter)

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#154
post #142

Turned off Disqus on my blog a couple of years ago ( https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments... ) and have been generally happy since then.

I also recently turned it off. I had gotten a couple of comments in the past but my blog is quite low-traffic. Mostly a place for me to practice writing (and occasionally vent). However I did like the simplicity of Disqus. I tried looking around for something similar with the following requirements:

- No third party code on my domain. - Minimal code to write myself.

Most of these tools work using an iframe, so the code that they run on your domain is minimal but they end up loading as a script that injects the iframe. AFAICT the primary reason for this is is so that they can adjust the height of the iframe automatically. In some cases I could pull a pinned version of that API from NPM or similar however it would be nice if there was a truly minimal snippet that I could use.

It also makes me wonder, if iframes could have a dynamic height would this ecosystem flourish?

In the end I just added links at the bottom of each post to search for mentions on Reddit/Twitter and another link to share the post there. I then use a WebMentions bridge to collect responses. Right now I haven't published the code that displays WebMentions automatically but I might do that in the future.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#155
If you are looking for a free hosted comment system, check out Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com

I'm the founder and in 2021, the service is now Free for all to use.

Check out my reasons for opening up the service to all here: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

Big Tech must NOT have a monopoly on moderation!

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#157

I have (had) a Disqus account that I connected to via my google account. I say had because I haven't been able to login in a year or so via firefox. I just get a page that says "There was an error submitting the form. If you're having difficulty, try repeating the action on https://disqus.com " with an annoying meme gift on the background. Luckily the title of the page says "Embed: CSRF verification failed (403)" but…

> I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments.

Not exactly for comments, but look at https://hypothes.is

it is for collaborative note taking

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#158

The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only s…

I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue - so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive. On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other servi…

It's more fulfilling to offer the service for free than to have a handful of paying customers and watch the world fall into a monopoly of moderation by Big Tech.

My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried to sell it to people.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#159

roll your own commenting system

That is the easy part.

The faf is handling moderation. You won't need it at first but if you get any number of visitors worth counting there will be at least one loon amongst them uses your comment boxes to insult, drop in irrelevant musings for attention, hawk referrer links to products or links to try use you to game SEO, or to otherwise be an arse. And even before them you'll probably get the spam-bots, doing the above in an automated manner. Unless you actively moderate or have someone do it for you your site becomes something that presents that sort of rubbish to the rest of the Internet. If you have the time to deal with it fine, but do you really want that?

One of the advantages of a centralised service like Disqus is that those services will filter a lot of that out for you. With a self-hosted solution you have to manage that yourself. I've seen some attempts at a decentralised group moderation idea but none I can mention that have survived long enough to gain any traction - none in fact that I thought were actually practical (if I can think of an easy way to game a system, you can bet anything that people who essentially game systems for living (or a regular hobby, just for shits & giggles) can too).

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#160

Alternatives from my notes (never used them IRL): * https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman * https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack

Staticman is awesome for static websites! (next.js, jekyll etc). It provides user content via pull requests. That's all it does! This means you have complete control over the UI. No loading of 3rd party scripts etc.

I wrote a blog post about integrating it into Next.js: https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-...

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