I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
ryansouthgate.com
I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
1–10 of 408 posts
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#2I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#3Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be running for a day, or even a weekend.
They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#4[flagged]
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#5I think the concern of "blog comments" is best left to external platforms eg HN, Reddit etc
What would be more useful would be an automated list of places where the post has been discussed (and maybe pull the top comments from there through API?)
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#6I 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 advantange over Github issue/discussion based comment plugins:
1. All data is stored a .git
2. no login of any sort
Github OAuth login might leak all your repo data along with your `access_token` to the plugin provider.
The `git push` works for any remote. You can choose github/gitlab or whatever.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#7I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
If you really run it "for years without maintenance" then your blog will get taken over by attackers and used to distribute malware or worse.
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#8I think the concern of "blog comments" is best left to external platforms eg HN, Reddit etc What would be more useful would be an automated list of places where the post has been discussed (and maybe pull the top comments from there through API?)
There used to be a time when comments were attached to the posts. Where anyone could come, leave their name and a comment, and let the author know if any edits, misspellings, or how they liked the article.
Social media ruined that. Everyone is now on their own soap box posting comments of drivel from their sub-optimal self-conscious parroting asinine talking points about how one characterized group of statistics ruined it for everyone else. Bots, drivel, linkbacks, social media, stupid laws, and an aversion to independence - we have what we have today. Large platforms that trick humans into use because they have the largest arenas.
Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads. Because they ran ad-free for so long it’s possible their token in the AdTech ecosystem is stale in which case it hasn’t put it into any buckets yet. Ergo, you get the smoking/drinking/scamming/doesn’t fit category.
A “token” is a device or ident signature used to identify a viewer or user so that they can tabulate impressions, build personas, categorize your shopping habits, track the sites you visit, link your token with others in your proximity
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#9I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
Well, back in the day this lead to thousands upon thousands of vulnerable WordPress sites
Re: I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse
#10Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be runni…
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