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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

#191

Post by rchaud »

There was once a time when advertisers had to show some creativity in their ad copy to develop brand recognition and stay within the editorial guidelines of magazines and newspapers.

Online "targeted" ads eliminated the gatekeeper in favour of a free-for-all where shady companies are encouraged to hide their identities so they can simply advertise under a different name when their ad account eventually gets banned. 20 years ago I was seeing scam ads for "mail order brides", "free iPods" and "legal buds", today its crypto scams , political spam and misinformation.

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

#192

Post by mort96 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #137
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…

> 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.

I agree, I would be using an ad blocker even if all the ads were "only" annoying attempts at manipulating my behavior rather than scams and malware. But pointing out that ads can damage your computer or scam you out of money or information is a stronger pro-ad-blocking argument.

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

#193

Post by mort96 »

RajT88 wrote: post #184
mort96 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And everywhere else, honestly. It's not like banner ads on the web are particularly honest here in the EU/EEA.

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

#194

Post by noirscape »

In terms of blogs, for selfhosting comments, the main ones that seems interesting for selfhosted setups are probably remark42[0] and utterance.es[1]. Remark42 is a low barrier Disqus clone with social logins (as well as just plain usernames) that also makes it fairly easy for users to bulk export their own data (as well as delete I think?), which ought to take care of most GDPR stuff.

Utterance.es is GitHub issues backed comments, which is an inherent barrier to commenting, but YMMV if that's an actual problem (generally the value of unbarred comment sections is abysmal). Like remark42, it's open source, but you're relying on a third party's servers.

[0]: https://github.com/umputun/remark42

[1]: https://utteranc.es/

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

#195

Post by est »

kakarot253 wrote: post #154

You can use github for comments, I had implemented it on my blog earlier. Currently removed the section completly. Here is an example on this site. https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...

The catch: OAuth login will "Act on your behalf"

Which means complete control of all your github account.

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

#196

Post by ToucanLoucan »

hnlmorg wrote: post #141
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. there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders. This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....

Because scams are a threat to the serfs, and people spreading the truth about global events and issues is a threat to the powerful. That's why I really don't bag on "slacktivists" anymore. I'm not saying there isn't SOME truth to the notion that people reliably pick the one kind of activism that doesn't require getting off the sofa, it's a fair critique. However even that kind of activism is now heavily policed around the humanitarian crisis that won't be named.

If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.

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

#197

Post by rchaud »

mrweasel wrote: post #94
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.

That's a really good point. If the problem is the scammers, and they buy ads, then why won't they let us report it?

Because they don't want to drive off business.

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

#198

Post by rchaud »

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…

If they post the episode on Youtube, download an audio stream of that file instead. No ads injected there.

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

#199

Post by dspillett »

tgv wrote: post #136
dspillett wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will last long enough for even the more determined keyboard warriors to get bored of arguing with themselves and typing in all caps YOU DON'T EVEN CARE DO YOU or similar…

TBH, I have considered writing a version (this isn't my work at all, yet) that does submit the blathering server-side so it looks like there is a useful round trip, but:

* I have more important projects awaiting the much fabled arrival of Free Time!

* While it could potentially keep an idiot “happy” longer, I'd have to mess around with some sort of login system to give the right people the right comments back, it couldn't rely on a just session ID as that would be as volatile as the comments in local storage.

* Taking in the data gives the possibility of DoS by extra routes.

* Giving back the data gives the possibility of the comments being abused as a Heath-Robinson-esk storage device!

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