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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
61–70 of 408 posts
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#62If people want to write comments provide an email address to send comments to. You will get better comments this way.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#63Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#64I used to use Disqus on my blog a long time ago, but dropped it with one of the many reboots. Having comments on a blog still seems like a good idea but I'm still half minds over on-page vs fediverse-based discussion, or maybe even both. Spam is a constant problem.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#65For everyone saying "just have the comments on social networking sites" - that fragments the conversation, makes people sign up to a service if they want to comment, and exposes them to ads on 3rd party sites. You also get no control over the level of abuse, misinformation, and spam on those external sites. The joy of having comments on your own site is that you can moderate the bad-faith discussions and curate a fri…
Unless you're famous enough that everything you post gets to the top of Google, no one will read your content unless you post it to a social media platform with a curated audience. Literally no one but bots and AI crawlers. I mean, you have a whole list of crossposting links at the bottom of your own blog posts, including to HN and Mastodon, so you clearly understand. You wouldn't lose anything by limiting comments t…
Looking through my recent comments, the majority are from people filling in the box on my posts. So, yes, I would lose a lot if I switched them off.
You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog.
That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#66Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#67Wow thanks for the reminder! I have a small side project [0] with Disqus and got the email there would be ads but didn't think to check it out and due to ublock I was kind of oblivious to how they looked.
Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png
The size of it, above the comments (and under as well of course). That is madness.
I'll have to check some of the alternative listed in here. I could just code it but I really don't want to deal with spam and moderation... Or maybe I'll remove comments altogether.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#68I ditched Disqus for the exact same reason, too many ads Then I built an alternative using free Cloudflare Worker https://github.com/est/req4cmt It's a simple service that transform comment POST form data to JSON, append to a .jsonl file, then do a `git push` It renders comments by `git fetch` from a .jsonl file from a remote repo, or simply via raw.githubusercontent.com if your repo was hosted by Github. The advanta…
I find the idea of using Git for comments somewhat terrifying, not least of all for the permanence of the history making moderation a nightmare.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#69All centralized services will eventually present a variant of this disease and indeed almost all are already. Actual baseline improvement in technology requires fully decentralized software similar to bittorrent and it's ilk imho.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#70Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported serv…
The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.