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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

#181

Post by jrmg »

miltonlost wrote: post #180
jrmg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue.

The situation’s been like this for a few years now.

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

#182

Post by Forgeties79 »

genewitch wrote: post #175
Forgeties79 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s a (good) choice by the shows you listen to. There are plenty of ad injection services for podcasting, pretty sure Acast (popular hosting service) has it built in for instance. Search “DAI podcast” or “dynamic ad insertion podcast.”

The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.

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

#183

Post by navigate8310 »

dspillett wrote: post #74
huijzer wrote: post #30

I 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 so funny and genius

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

#184

Post by RajT88 »

mort96 wrote: post #178
jrmg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

There's a lot of that going around in the US these days.

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

#185

Post by RajT88 »

These look like standard disqus ads. Which is to say - like you see when you scroll to the bottom of a Breitbart article.

I would totally agree that this makes your site look like an armpit of the internet, but also - there was a way to figure out that this would happen ahead of time. Google Ads last I checked weren't nearly as bad, but even these were prone to scams and malvertising campaigns on sites I've frequented.

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

#186

Post by Zak »

I use Mastodon for comments on one of my sites using a slightly modified version of the code featured here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.

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

#187

Post by sachac »

I took Disqus out of my blog back in March. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Disqus had started to feel quite icky. I exported 18 years of comments from Disqus and wrote a little code to include them in my static site generation process. Now I just stick a footer with an e-mail link (and Mastodon thread link, if there is one) on each of my posts on the website and RSS feed. I get few comments, anyway, so I'd rather not subject everyone to all that tracking and ad nonsense.

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

#188

Post by conradfr »

antonyh wrote: post #64

I 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?

Looked good but it seems this comment single-handedly crash them?

Also the project does not seem active.

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

#189

Post by miltonlost »

jrmg wrote: post #181
miltonlost wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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

I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue. The situation’s been like this for a few years now.

Not fake ads, but Biden's FTC did go after fake reviewers and fake reviews: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-ftc-fina...

If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.

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

#190

Post by magicmicah85 »

dspillett wrote: post #74
huijzer wrote: post #30

I 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 so evil. I love it.
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