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Disqus, a dark commenting system

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Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#181

Post by dredmorbius »

tal8d wrote: post #71
rebuilder wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the hobbyist web still exists. But it's hampered by the much larger commercial web IMO. The influx of members to any non-commercial web community is disturbed by the commercial entities that draw so much of the attention that to most people, it seems like there isn't anything else on the web. The big fish use up so much oxygen that the little fish in the pond shrivel up. They live, but in a stunted form.

Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy, zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents... what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite the machinations of unshriveled fish?

Attention is zero-sum. There are 24 hours in a day. People only spend so much time online. There is no bigger bag or truck.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#182

Post by seanyesmunt »

carlbordum wrote: post #164

Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels. This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to…

When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing Detection" message.

> This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#183

Post by dredmorbius »

KirillPanov wrote: post #10
pfranz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already think that has happened for companies and startups, but I don't think much progress at all has been made for individuals. I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it…

> Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads ... Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening. Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do. If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of th…

AML: anti-money laundering

KYC: know your customers

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#184

Post by elliekelly »

learyjk wrote: post #177

Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's functionality by directing users who had made comments to really shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/ I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this…

This is not even remotely related to your comment but wow your bolognese looks incredible.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#185

Post by duckmysick »

pmlnr wrote: post #170
duckmysick wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are proud of their work and they want to show it to others. The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. It's like sending invitations to your birthday party. It feels bad when just one person shows up. > They need sincere search engines, that's all. What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?

> The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. That is called vanity in one word. > What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators? If it really is a hobby, one enjoys it on it's own. The "showcase" part shouldn't be essential for one to take joy in the process. My recommendation is to find a space where one can share what they achieved, but it really doesn't…

I wouldn't call it vanity; it's too harsh and unfair. It paints people who are enthusiastic about their accomplishments in a negative light. People shouldn't be ashamed to be proud of their honest work.

Showcasing isn't essential, but it can increase the enjoyment and it can benefit the others. That's why we have art galleries, trade fairs, talent shows, and Show HN threads.

I specifically asked about how "They need sincere search engines, that's all." What exactly content creators should do about it? Make their own, sacrificing time from their main hobby? Maybe one already exists. But then they need to tell their potential fans about it. How would they contact them? They might not even be aware they exist. I guess they could wait until the new sincere search engine reaches critical mass. But what until then?

As for the "wide audience", consider this. At one point in their lives, fans were part of the wide audience. They weren't born fans; they became them over time. So why shouldn't the content creators try to capture new fans from the larger audience? They don't have to - becoming too mainstream is a thing after all. But if they choose to do so, why not? Unless you oppose the creators growing their fans and popularity, in which case I don't know what to say.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#186

Post by rectang »

chewxy wrote: post #152
CarVac wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see 7 comments when I go to that page. Dig Dgraph fix something in the last hour? Or is the site treating you differently from me because I'm completely unknown to it?

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#187

Post by andrewflnr »

sambf wrote: post #27
andrewflnr wrote: post #12

What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento ( https://github.com/adtac/commento ) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.

I'm using Isso [0], it's simple, lightweight, and does the job. A demo is on their page. [0] https://posativ.org/isso/

That looks perfect.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#188

Post by tinus_hn »

foxhop wrote: post #163
tinus_hn wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of a commenting system is not in hosting, it’s in moderation.

And that cost falls squarely on the site owner not the comment service. Moderation may be as expensive or as cheap as you make it. Big Tech is spending a lot of money on it, thousands of people and jobs and algorithms. If you ask me, it's a fools errand and I hope that they waste their money trying to build a clean Internet. Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

I don’t know the rules for Disqus but I expect that they impose at least some limits to block bots and spam, which is almost impossible to achieve for a small site.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#189

Post by dredmorbius »

EGreg wrote: post #122

This is so stupid, by the way. Can’t Disqus simply use its OWN third party cookie in the back end to inform all these other sites and grab their information to display, even cache some of it? Disqus is being sloppy and just angering its own “customers” is the websites and users.

I've seen suggested before that third-party tracking is used to validate results and prevent self-dealing and fraud.

When your primary function is counting things, trusting the tallymen is critical. Multiple independent counts addresses this.

How true this is I don't know.

Dispensing with the counting avoids this need.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#190

Post by nickjj »

foxhop wrote: post #165
nickjj wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments. I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments. I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Somet…

I can help you import your users and comments into Remarkbox if you like to move your community.

Thanks a lot for the offer but I think I'm going to decline for now. It's nothing personal or even related to your comment service specifically.

For the sake of transparency here's the questions going through my mind and how I arrived at this decision based on using the free version of Disqus:

- A lot of people have a Disqus account and having a low barrier of entry to comment is important. When most folks don't need to create an account, that's kind of nice.

- Disqus has been around for a really long time and has handled billions of comments. This gives me confidence the service isn't going to be down for maintenance regularly, or just break one day.

- Disqus has a pretty good spam filter due to having so much volume. I would rather not be bothered by having to do manual spam moderation regularly and if I hooked up a 3rd party service to do that I would end up either having to pay for that, or you're still allowing another company to profit from your data.

- Disqus makes it pretty easy to moderate comments. You get notified of a new comment by email, click it, and then hit a drop down and figure out how you want to moderate it.

- Most developers are using some form of ad-blocker so Disqus' invasive ads are stopped. Although Disqus can still read the contents of the comments and profit from them in other ways (improve services around paid offerings, maybe selling the data to other companies doing ML around written text, etc.).

To be fair this is also why I haven't picked any semi-popular open source self hosted comment solutions. I wouldn't mind self hosting it alongside my blog on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server, but all of my objections apply to this as well. And now there's also the added risk of the code having security vulnerabilities that could potentially expose my server or even worse leak personal data from the people who have commented, such as their email address.

I could write the code myself which I've thought about for a while too, but the spam problem is still there. There's also allocating all of the time necessary to implement such a thing in a production ready way. When really all I want to do is create new blog posts / videos and have a way for folks to contribute to the conversation in a persisted way.

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