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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
131–140 of 408 posts
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#132Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be runni…
When it was released there were no ads at all, and it was a great way of quickly adding comments to your site. Of course there is no thing as free lunch so the enshittification was inevitable
Disqus was openly bragging about how many people they were tracking and data-mining from day 1.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#133You still need comments on your blog. I hate having to log in to Twitter or HN to leave a comment.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#134I just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
I use HN a fair amount. I often post articles here but I also feel bad about doing it because 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong. I think it might be good to cross post everything here and link to the HN comments for discussion. Is this frowned on at all? I always worry I'll get shadow banned or something for my 100 low vote posts. Here's the rule I worry about: > Please don't use HN primarily…
> 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong.
This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted multiple times with no traction and then they suddenly blow up on 4th attempt.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#135I just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
I like https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js - it is basically a global shadow-ban for everyone who comments…
This is awesome!
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#136I just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
I like https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js - it is basically a global shadow-ban for everyone who comments…
Local storage gets erased at some point. Perhaps it takes so long that nobody notices.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best bu…
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#138Other 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.
Just remember, advertising is responsible for the rage economy. It's responsible for platforming misinformation. It's responsible for screen-addiction in children. It's responsible for online scams. Just think of all of the proposed laws and regulations around the world that are trying to counter each of these problems and remember that the root cause, and enabler of all of them is advertising. It's truly an amplifier of enshittification, and one of the worst conduits of bad social behaviour ever invented. If you're in the ad / ad-tech industry, please seriously consider the effect you're having on the world.
I'm happy to pay for media, news, social networks etc. I don't purchase things based on anything other than personal recommendations and research. I have no use for advertising, and I have no desire or need for ad-supported platforms. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. People say advertising works, and that justifies it. The thing is, advertising only works on enough people to justify it. Everyone else hates it with a passion, or studiously avoids it. I'm not sure if we're a majority or a minority, it doesn't matter, but we suffer advertising and wish it were gone.
Advertising needs to change. It would be nice if it just went away, but realistically that's not going to happen. It needs to be recognised as harmful and regulated as a harmful product.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#139I 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…
The issue with that approach is risk. You now have a direct way for users to insert data into your repo, which can include illegal things. And if you're required to delete it later, you'll be forced to edit your git history. But if everyone behaves, it's a great solution
Worrying about editing git history buries the lede. Any comment system allows users to insert data into your site, which, if it might be illegal things, is a legal risk.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#140I keep using isso https://isso-comments.de/ I installed it on my static blog very easily, and I own all the data. Also it is GDPR-compliant (because it provide hints on how to remove data like IPs) and it is very light. For me Disqus and similia are a dead end.
Looks very nice. Thanks.