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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

#341

Post by lelanthran »

snailmailman wrote: post #334
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…

When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad. Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly ille…

> When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.

What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?

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

#342

Post by stackskipton »

duxup wrote: post #327
hnuser123456 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a dark pattern to punish you for turning off personalization.

It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.

They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.

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

#343

Post by zenmac »

edoceo wrote: post #230
zenmac wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? Be good to join discussion from the past and bring back some zombie thread? No?

No. Re-post / start a new thread. Many times the old-threads will be cross-linked (I see this pattern a lot on HN)

Can we post one referencing previous HN link? ?

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

#344

Post by loloquwowndueo »

blakesterz wrote: post #103
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #54

I’m in the process of converting a Wordpress blog to a static site. We did have significant comment traffic back in the day so I did look into how to maintain comment functionality. I found Comentario https://docs.comentario.app/en/ which is a standalone comments engine that can be self-hosted and linked to the blog page. Single stand alone Go executable, SQLite database - seems dead simple and has built-in ways to m…

What are you using to convert Wordpress to static pages?

https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo

It dumps all pages and articles as markdown with most Wordpress metadata as front matter metadata, and all comments in a separate yaml file which can be processed as needed. It creates a minimal theme with the necessary templates to do a basic static render of the content. It does need some theme and template tweaking to match Wordpress url structure and ensure all pages end up in the same url/permalink.

I also used a Wordpress hugo exporter plug-in about 3 years ago - worked mostly the same.

Using Hugo still allows me to more easily add content to the site while maintaining a consistent templating and design.

I also experimented with doing a simple static dump of html as generated by Wordpress - I tried two ways, using wget —-mirror which kinda worked but generated a lot of redundant pages, and a Wordpress plugin called “simply static” which was supposed to do something similar but in the end didn’t work.

In the end I decided against the static dump because it would have entirely “frozen” the site in time - I did want the ability to add content down the line; or change the design without having to modify the content significantly. Archiving sites verbatim is best left to the experts at archive.org :)

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

#345

Post by mvdtnz »

drnick1 wrote: post #246

"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like." It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years. Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply m…

> "After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."

I'm curious when I see quotes like this - are people exposing their home network to the internet? Or running a pi-hole in the cloud? VPN'ing into the home network? Or what?

I have run a pi-hole in the traditional sense (a raspberry pi with pi-hole software on my home network with my home router DNS pointing at it). But this doesn't prevent me from seeing ads when I'm out and about on 5G or public wifi or work wifi or whatever.

As an aside I stopped running pi-holes at home for reliability reasons. Lots of failed SD cards, locked up raspberry pis etc became more aggravation than it was worth. It's a neat system - when it's working.

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

#346

Post by mvdtnz »

liampulles wrote: post #235

From conception, I've never wanted a comment section on my blog. I just put a line that in effect says "if you want to comment, you can send me an email at xyz". If you are coming to a blog post of mine that has been shared to you, my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section. I am aiding you by not even putting a comment secti…

I like the way Mark Seeman (ploeh) handles blog comments. He asks users to open a PR[0] with a comment on the post. Obviously the volume of comments is very low, but it sure is effective at targeting the right audience and keeping the bots out.

[0] https://github.com/ploeh/ploeh.github.com#readme

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

#347

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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

It's not even that there's no enforcement... you could talk to your state's AG. But their budgets aren't infinite, and the scammers are overseas as likely as not. Unless the scam rises above some (absurdly high) threshold or threatens someone very important/wealthy, it's going to be back-burnered.

The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.

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

#348

Post by efreak »

notRobot wrote: post #56
chistev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, it's what modern blogs do. The discussions happen on social media and platforms where they are shared

This has disadvantages though! Often the threads on sites like HN/reddit get "archived" or lose traction and you cannot join the discussion if you don't happen to discover the article in the first few days of it getting published. In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose question…

Counterpoint: the last dozen it so times I've wanted to leave a comment on a website, I scrolled down to find that comments were automatically disabled 24hr/a week/year after the post was created. Nobody wants to deal with moderating comments.

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

#349

Post by duxup »

stackskipton wrote: post #342
duxup wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.

They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.

The poo ads will continue until I comply I guess.

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

#350

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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 amazing that I wish I ran a blog just so I could run this.
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