Disqus, a dark commenting system • Hacker News Board

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#41

Post by orangepanda » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:46 AM UTC

strogonoff wrote: post #19

yborg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will do nothing. They will take the sub revenue and keep the current privacy monetization too. The only way to stop it is legislation.

If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS. If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive. The expectation of free service is what enables shady prac…

> If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users

Will it lose some users? Sure. Most? No.

You can buy a tv costing 4 digits that happily will harvest data and show you ads.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#42

Post by Un1corn » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

strogonoff wrote: post #19

yborg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will do nothing. They will take the sub revenue and keep the current privacy monetization too. The only way to stop it is legislation.

If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS. If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive. The expectation of free service is what enables shady prac…

>it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS

So never? People don't read the ToS and certainly don't judge services by it. It seems people have come to accept surveillance capitalism as a fact of life

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#43

Post by BLKNSLVR » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

somedude895 wrote: post #26

> ib.adnxs.com - Malware site, "Adnxs appeared as the eighth-biggest name in our Tracking the Trackers data This is AppNexus, the second-biggest display ad broker after Google. It can be argued that both Google and AppNexus facilitate the spreading of malware by injecting ads which sometimes aren't properly vetted, but simply calling it a malware site is very misleading.

"aren't properly vetted"

Malware distribution by negligence and "malware site" are a hairs breadth apart on my scale, especially when it's negligence on behalf of an ad-broker.

That kind of negligence is what gives their entire industry a bad name. But then I consider trackers as malware anyway, as is my personal bias.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#44

Post by alexgmcm » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

spicyramen wrote: post #33

tal8d wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there…

This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.

Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience.

I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it.

But man, I really hate Medium.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#45

Post by freddie_mercury » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

ivolimmen wrote: post #2

At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The internet always have been a place where most stuff is free and people got used to that. At some point after that the dark parts and ad parts of the web will reside; but I do not think it will completely disappear.

While I agree that more people should be willing to pay for services, I'm less certain that it would actually make a huge difference.

Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads.

And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out.

So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#46

Post by blackcats » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:58 AM UTC

This is why I dropped disqus and made my own comment system

https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#47

Post by throw14082020 » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced.

I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#48

Post by geek_at » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:07 AM UTC

alexgmcm wrote: post #44

spicyramen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.

Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it. But man, I really hate Medium.

not true, I have started a blog and hosted it on blogspot at first but wasn't satisfied with the style in general and the lack of customization so I built my own in bootstrap + php and hosted it on a 5€/month Server. No tracking, no ads, no external libraries, no referral links, no monetization.

After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc.

Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down.

You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading.

https://blog.haschek.at

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#49

Post by unicornporn » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

Talanes wrote: post #11

unicornporn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.

The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives. I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.

There's an excellent example in this very thread on how politics (i.e. democracy) can trump capital.

Read here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131

Re: Disqus, a dark commenting system

#50

Post by StavrosK » Fri, Feb 05, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #12

What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento ( https://github.com/adtac/commento ) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.

Commento is abandoned, they have a bug that prevents login and it's gone unfixed for years:

https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/-/issues/174