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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

#171

Post by genewitch »

Intermernet wrote: post #138
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.

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 amplifie…

Explicit (seriously, explicit) Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.

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

#172

Post by genewitch »

DelightOne wrote: post #107
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.

I bet they tried an llm scam detector. It was too good so they didn't put it into production.

i can write that in like 2 minutes in any language you want.

  `pseudo
  main(
      return True
  )`
There's a difference between "Need a tree cut down? I am licensed and bonded and cut down trees; call ###" and the sort of things that we all consider "ads". If someone can't see a difference, then that someone probably receives money from advertising.

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

#173

Post by jmmv »

Same here. I removed Disqus a while back due to how obnoxious it became. Then, I built my own commenting platform and, while it was a fun thing to do... I think it's worthless. People don't comment on blogs anymore, and when they do, the value is too low. Discussions happen elsewhere now. I've been tempted to just remove the comments altogether but haven't gotten to it.

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

#175

Post by genewitch »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #129
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.

It also doesn’t help that so many creators - even legitimate ones - now use injected ads that they don’t verify at all. I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush. First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for…

where are the ads injected? I use a couple of podcast "apps" and neither inject ads, all ads in podcasts are explicitly put into the audio file by the people making the podcast, even pre-roll and post-roll ads.

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

#176

Post by awithrow »

redbell wrote: post #142

> With this post, I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse, and frankly, they were profiting off my work and my visitor’s data . Ironically, if you look at the screenshot, just below the comments' section, you will read: 'Subscribe', ' Privacy ' and ' Do Not Sell My Data '. Seriously?! You are already torturing my visitors by throwing many ads, at the same time, on their faces. How can I trust you? Also, what…

The 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data' buttons are still part of the Disqus wodget

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

#177

Post by est »

antonyh wrote: post #68
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…

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.

They are just bunch of static hosted .jsonl text files, one comment per commit, and makes up exactly one line

In case of comments you don't like, just delete the line and `git commit`

to erase the history entirely, use `git cherry-pick` and `git push -f`

It might be a nightmare for people not familiar with `git`, but for folks running a static blog like Hugo, they use lots of shell commands anyway.

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

#178

Post by mort96 »

jrmg wrote: post #162
mort96 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior. In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

There's no meaningful difference in my mind between "there are no laws" and "there are technically laws but they're completely unenforced".

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

#180

Post by miltonlost »

jrmg wrote: post #162
mort96 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior. In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising

*no enforcement any longer. Back when we had Lina Khan at the FTC, she would have enforced it. Now we have a scammer-in-chief only enforcing laws against his political opponents
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