handling bots is just not worth it. if there is a discussion happening on hackernews i usually add a link to the article. i also like the way lowtechmagazine handles comments but some could also argue that it builds an echo chamber if you are handling the moderation of your own content but that would also be happening on a normal blog.
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?
#12Social platforms did a tremendously effective job of training and conditioning the users to not escape their walled gardens and not even click links, let alone read or comment on blog posts. And platforms like Twitter bury tweets with links anyway, so few users get to see them in the first place.
For Wordpress you may use an ActivityPub plugin and have your commenting coming from the Fediverse.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#13Was thinking about it regarding "do it myself or use a third party eg. Discus" sure it's easy to drop but then it's not your data anymore... Also I would think you lose SEO for an async loaded thing like discus. The other issue is identity/cross platform. And abuse.
Disqus? Best first check this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033052
Man I'm doing it again spelling similar sounding words, I still get affect/effect and then/than straight though ha.
My use on disqus is a burner context, but that's a good tip if considering using it to host stuff for your own site.
The writing on Medium comment someone made... That's tough, it's like shouting into the void, no response. For ex. I tried Vimeo to get away from YT but no watchers... Come back to YT, people are engaging/looking at it. Which then you gotta ask why are you making stuff publicly, so you want people to see it? If you write your own blog, gaining traction will be slow, probably have to spam existing sites with links to your site. I don't think people post ads for blogs.
Tracking is real not denying that. I search something on Google and I see ads for it later (on my phone, on the aggregated articles feed view in Android) unless I explicitly use Incognito or another browser.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#14Maybe I'm in the minority here based on the comments I can see so far, but I really do value good comments on a blog when they come up.
I do sympathise with writers who don't want to deal with moderating it, working out how to manage them is a problem, but finding the one of dozens of spaces people are talking about the thing written is also challenging.
I mean, my own blog doesn't have comments.
Twitter et al don't really solve this I find because you really can't find the different threads of discussion that are occurring after the fact. It's really not helpful when you're trying to understand what was being said at the time on those kinds of platforms. I don't want to have to be an archaeologist to work out what was being said at the time about a topic.
One recent trend which I do like is authors explicitly calling out spaces to respond to their work, via a link. I see this a lot with HN and reddit threads being called out by the author and it's really nice reading the follow on thoughts of people who've engaged with the writing, perhaps years later from when the initial article was written.
But I do think we need a better solution to this.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#15Hm... What are comments like in 2022, I ask myself. There's lot of hate, spam and other abuse, one word replies or no replies at all. Is that worth running the "infrastructure", checking comments, moderating them? I don't think so, I don't miss comments in blogs.
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Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#16I have yet to implement this but I think a really good idea for blog comments is to link your blog post to a fediverse post. It has been posted here on HN several times already so you can google it but people have done this already.
That way you get the moderation of the fediverse, an account on some AP instance is required, but you can still display the comments on your website with embedded JS.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#17Running 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 best of both worlds.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#18Small blog here [1]. Had very positive experiences with comments powered by GitHub Discussions (giscus [2]). No Spam so far and the comments were on-topic.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/ [2]: https://giscus.app/
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#19It depends on what you are doing. Imagine a blog about model steam trains, say 3.5" guage. It is not general interest.
Or local archaeology. Again, not general interest.
Or an artist and his/her work. Again not general interest.
But in all these scenarios there is benefit in it not being yet another Facebook group and having comments open for that specific community.
For spam there is good old recapthca and then the check to see if it is Eric Jones.
Some people are not popular and don't get a torrent of comments to filter.
It all depends on what you are doing.
With software you can't expect useful comments. Stack Overflow have got people covered. But with something like model steam engines where there is geographical scope and a particular demographic, comments make sense.
Re: Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
#20I have yet to implement this but I think a really good idea for blog comments is to link your blog post to a fediverse post. It has been posted here on HN several times already so you can google it but people have done this already. That way you get the moderation of the fediverse, an account on some AP instance is required, but you can still display the comments on your website with embedded JS.
Also if you think this sounds neat and don't have a blog setup of choice already, writefreely is both easy to self-host and has public and free instances: https://writefreely.org/