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I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

ryansouthgate.com

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Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#151

Post by inetknght »

gruez wrote: post #126
tetris11 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough. what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same…

> if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable

Or maybe, just maybe, the entire industry is crap and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#152

Post by m-hodges »

erikig wrote: post #115

As far as alternatives go, there was an interesting post a few weeks ago on using Bluesky as a commenting platform. It improves discoverability and adds a social aspect to comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164 I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.

There are similar¹𝄒²𝄒³ ideas for Mastodon / ActivityPub:

¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/

² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/

³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#153

Post by hnlmorg »

secondcoming wrote: post #145
hnlmorg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's YouTube's excuse?

They allow them, and people who have ad personalisation disabled are probably seeing more of them

Yes, but YT obviously doesn't use Taboola and it's still infested with scam ads.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#155

Post by conradfr »

secondcoming wrote: post #130
lupusreal wrote: post #70

Earlier 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.

Websites get to control what ads are displayed. If a website integrates with Taboola they're explixitly opting in to these crap ads.

It doesn't work for adsense as they basically get a new account every day so you can't effectively block scams.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#156

Post by est »

ffsm8 wrote: post #36
est wrote: post #6

I 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

> direct way for users to insert data into your repo

Yes, and spam is also a huge concern.

I plan to mitigate by adding "Pull Request" style moderation next.

And you can switch to a private repo

For mass moderation, just git clone, grep the lines, sed them out, and `git push -f`

Remember the use case is for static generated personal blogs.

I'd argue it's even quicker than, say a paginated bloated megabytes javascript rendered single-page application moderation system.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#157

Post by kakarot253 »

edarchis wrote: post #16
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.

The author is using a random CMS, namely Hugo. You probably mean a PHP that can be hosted for cheap. But then, you end up with a Wordpress nightmare, even more spam and security issues. I had a pretty popular blog and some posts gathered hundreds of useful comments. But I was so tired of fighting spam that I threw it all away and started using Hugo too, without comments.

Me too, there is no need to have comments I feel you can have a feedback button at most if you want it.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#159

Post by est »

bmez wrote: post #40
ffsm8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

and the wasted CPU and memory involved. Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system, it is overcomplicating it in ways previously unimaginable.

> Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system

I did try to implement partial-clone but failed

Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate.

It is painful for writing, but reading comments is quite fast and 99% is about loading.

Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse

#160

Post by sofixa »

tetris11 wrote: post #102
D13Fd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on. There is a massive difference between an ad that optimistically emphasizes the best aspects of a real product or service and an ad for a fake product or service that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.

I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.

Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.

Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

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