[HN Gopher] Disqus, a dark commenting system
___________________________________________________________________
Disqus, a dark commenting system
Author : supz_k
Score : 463 points
Date : 2021-02-05 04:17 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (supunkavinda.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (supunkavinda.blog)
| marcjensen wrote:
| > Obviously, advertising companies do everything to increase
| their revenue.
|
| It's bit naive. Every company exists to increase their revenue.
| darekkay wrote:
| I've started collecting different ways to include blog comments a
| few years ago [1]. After using Disqus for several years, I've
| removed the comments on my blog and link to social networks
| instead (mostly Twitter and Mastodon).
|
| [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/
| joveian wrote:
| Nice list, thanks. The one other possibility that I personally
| like but is out of fasion these days is the mailing list. A
| private archive mailing list with moderate first comment seems
| like it should be fairly easy to maintain, although I haven't
| actually tried yet. This would best be combined with the manual
| method you mention and would likely mostly work when there is
| something beyond the blog itself drawing people to be
| interested in the discussion (or maybe sufficienly popular
| blogs it could work anyway).
|
| The benefits of that method as I see it are: discussion can
| more easily go beyond particular blog posts, the website can
| potentially be fully static, and (sometimes an advantage,
| sometimes disadvantage) only the more interested people (in
| either the blog or community depending on how it is described)
| will bother subscribing. Also, it makes it possible (once you
| have subscribers at least) to first write posts to the list and
| get some comments before revealing it to the world. The main
| disadvantage I see for someone who otherwise finds the other
| tradeoffs ok is that people are understandibly more reluctant
| to reveal their email these days and many people don't have a
| basic conception of what a discussion mailing list is so it
| would be a good idea to have a general FAQ that describes the
| basics and links to some free email providers.
| unicornporn wrote:
| How is this GDPR compliant? What tracking is used for EU
| citizens? I've seen no consent notices here in the EU.
| nannal wrote:
| File a complaint to your local gdpr body
| SahAssar wrote:
| It isn't, but I'm guessing their argument is that the website
| owner should get consent before loading their code. Of course
| in practice basically no one does that and they seem to be
| banking on that fact.
| 3np wrote:
| Disqus is not necessarily off the hook here. GDPR identifies
| several roles with different requirements (Data Processor,
| Data Controller)
| mmgu wrote:
| Disqus does not track users from GDPR countries by default. My
| initial story in December 2019 for the Norwegian broadcaster
| NRK was a result of Disqus not knowing Norway had the GDPR (we
| are part of EEA, but not EU).
|
| Users are checked based on IP whether they come from a GDPR
| country. If GDPR, they will be put in private mode. A user
| needs to create a profile and consent to sharing for tracking
| to begin.
|
| Norwegian DPA opened an investigation as a result of our
| stories and Norwegians are now in private mode by default.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Fair to say this is necessary but not sufficient. GDPR covers
| users within GDPR countries but also European data subjects
| wherever they are in the world.
| Daho0n wrote:
| This gets repeated over and over on HN but it isn't true. I
| feel this is because so many try to make GDPR seem too hard
| and breaking everything (likely people with something to
| lose).
|
| GDPR is for _data in the EU_. That is it. Not data outside
| the EU and not people outside the EU. An American in the EU
| is covered, an EU citizen in the US is not.
|
| What you are saying would require that the EU could create
| laws that were above the Supreme Court in the US for
| example. It simply isn't true.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| > I feel this is because so many try to make GDPR seem
| too hard and breaking everything (likely people with
| something to lose).
|
| Or people who wish to extend the reach of GDPR so that
| others outside of the EU are protected too.
|
| > What you are saying would require that the EU could
| create laws that were above the Supreme Court in the US
| for example
|
| This is not true for multiple reasons. Check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003
| specifically "Authorizes fines and/or imprisonment for up
| to 30 years for U.S. citizens or residents who engage in
| illicit sexual conduct abroad". The EU could punish US
| companies that have offices in the EU or income from the
| EU. Alternatively it could sanction them.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Hmm. I actually said that because that's what the GDPR
| training that I was forced to undertake by my employer
| taught me. That being said, reading the reguglation now
| shows me that was a misunderstanding.
|
| https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
|
| That being said it wouldn't require the EU to create laws
| which have jurisdiction above the US supreme court - if a
| company has any activity within Europe the European
| courts can act. There are other examples - for example UK
| libel law allows people under certain circumstances to
| sue for libel in the UK even if both parties are not UK
| citizens and the libel itself occurred outside the UK.
| Another example is the US CFTC which claims jurisdiction
| over all swaps transactions even if both parties are non-
| US and the swap itself happened outside the US.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Thanks for this!
| maciekmm wrote:
| Shameless plug:
|
| I started building a small commenting system that fetches
| comments from social media postings (hackernews, reddit atm.)
|
| It's not released yet, but You can sign up to know when it's
| ready. https://popvox.dev/
| Quanttek wrote:
| > How does Disqus sell your visitors' data with thirdparties
| without your consent?
|
| > Actually, you give them the consent when you agree to their
| privacy policy.
|
| I doubt that this is legal according to the GDPR.
|
| Also, didn't Mozilla also have a commenting system?
| https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-...
| grishka wrote:
| > consider migrating from Disqus to a privacy-first commenting
| system. One such service is Hyvor Talk
|
| I see blocked requests to doubleclick.net, which is a Google
| advertising domain, on its website. And then a lot more third-
| party domains that weren't blocked. Such privacy, much wow.
| learyjk wrote:
| Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I
| purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's
| functionality by directing users who had made comments to really
| shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the
| behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/
|
| I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know
| about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a
| look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!
| elliekelly wrote:
| This is not even remotely related to your comment but wow your
| bolognese looks incredible.
| unicornporn wrote:
| The one thing you can't do as a developer in 2021 is claim
| innocence while you're letting these companies feast on your
| visitors data. You do know how these things work and you're
| assisting surveillance capitalism. You are complicit in your
| silent embedding of these tracking devices.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Alternatives from my notes (never used them IRL):
|
| * https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman
|
| * https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack
| mradmin wrote:
| Staticman is awesome for static websites! (next.js, jekyll
| etc). It provides user content via pull requests. That's all it
| does! This means you have complete control over the UI. No
| loading of 3rd party scripts etc.
|
| I wrote a blog post about integrating it into Next.js:
| https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-...
| [deleted]
| tanrax wrote:
| I don't know why you use Disqus when there is an Opensource
| alternative: Glosa --> https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server
| bartread wrote:
| Several reasons immediately spring to mind:
|
| - it's yet another dependency on the back end (for a static
| site you may not even have a back end or a server you can
| install it on),
|
| - it requires Java, which is possibly yet another dependency
| and platform,
|
| - both of these need patching and updates
|
| - I do not love comment storage in JSON because it complicates
| backups
|
| - needs email configuration which can be something of a
| deliverability minefield, but Disqus handles this out of the
| box
|
| Fundamentally it's more work/complexity than some people will
| be willing to put in. Disqus is easy. Just drop it into your
| relevant page templates and it'll work.
| carlbordum wrote:
| Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated
| commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You
| control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed
| up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company
| decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no
| trackers/pixels.
|
| This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If
| you are interested, come talk to us on matrix
| (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our
| (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/,
| https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments
| searchableguy wrote:
| That's pretty interesting. I will check it out. Thanks for
| sharing. :D
| vlmutolo wrote:
| I think using Matrix for this is absolutely the right way to
| go. Does cactus conform to the threading specification? I was
| planning on eventually trying this myself, but felt like I
| should wait until the threading MSC stabilized.
| bashbjorn wrote:
| Aforementionend friend and Cactus Comments dev here.
|
| We don't support any sort of threading yet, although
| Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the
| road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are
| a higher priority right now.
|
| We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces
| stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| Can you comment on implementation / challenges of using Matrix
| for this?
|
| I've been working on a dumb git-like and been needing to add
| syncing. Being a git-like it could just centralize via SSH, but
| i had also debated a P2P platform like Matrix or IPFS.
|
| You use case UI-embedded Matrix interaction is especially
| interesting to me, because some of the UIs i plan for on this
| git-like are WASM based, Offline enabled PWAs.
|
| Thanks for your work here, super interesting!
| boarnoah wrote:
| Hey, I remember your post on the Level1Techs forum about this.
| Best of luck!
| bashbjorn wrote:
| Hey, thanks! It's a small web I guess.
| seanyesmunt wrote:
| When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing
| Detection" message.
|
| > This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list.
| This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask
| believes this domain could currently compromise your security
| and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access
| to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this
| warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Commento is abandoned, they have a bug that prevents login and
| it's gone unfixed for years:
|
| https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/-/issues/174
| prophesi wrote:
| Unfixed for 1 year, not years. I've got an instance of
| Commento running on two of my sites and haven't run into /
| heard of this issue on Firefox. Though I'm not using the
| Docker image.
|
| Maybe give better steps to reproduce the issue, as it seems
| to only be happening to one other person?
|
| It does seem like Commento's development has lost its
| momentum (last commit was 6 months ago). The author likely
| isn't getting more funding from Mozilla and is focusing on
| their primary money-maker, the cloud-hosted service.
| StavrosK wrote:
| > Unfixed for 1 year, not years
|
| May 2019 is almost two years now.
|
| > Maybe give better steps to reproduce the issue, as it
| seems to only be happening to one other person?
|
| Or maybe we're the only ones who bothered using/reporting
| it. I don't really have any STR, they consist of "Install
| Commento, try to log in, you can't".
| sambf wrote:
| I'm using Isso [0], it's simple, lightweight, and does the job.
| A demo is on their page.
|
| [0] https://posativ.org/isso/
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That looks perfect.
| dbrgn wrote:
| I've been using this for a few years already. Does it's job.
| I like it.
| darekkay wrote:
| My list should give you some ideas:
| https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/#self-hosted
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| Not self-hosted:
|
| One alternative I've seen a few times recently is to start your
| own subreddit. Post your articles to it, link to the Reddit
| thread at the bottom of each posting, and let the conversation
| take place over there.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Eh, hosting on reddit isn't much better than Disqus.
| corobo wrote:
| Worse even. It's in Reddit's interest to get the reader off
| your blog and into their app
| titanomachy wrote:
| Reddit has crippled their mobile browsing experience to push
| people towards the app. I'd prefer not to force all readers
| to download another app.
| input_sh wrote:
| I've seen some examples in which people embed Discourse
| discussions.
|
| There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which
| used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over
| to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.
| wyattjoh wrote:
| Lead developer at Coral here (so some experience :P)
|
| Coral is more suited typically to larger organizations trying
| to power multi-site community tools. It has a powerful
| moderation system that's all open source! It's probably
| overkill for a static blog or small site.
| andreareina wrote:
| I helped someone set up discourse[1] a long time ago, don't
| know how it stands up these days; it's got basically zero
| presence in the parts of the web I'm around.
|
| [1] https://www.discourse.org/
| akvadrako wrote:
| Discourse is quite popular, I see it regularly on new sites.
| Though it doesn't really fit the same niche as disqus.
| CarVac wrote:
| I've seen it used to operate as footer comments on blogs.
| chewxy wrote:
| Dgraph Labs uses it. I am a bit ambivalent about it. For
| example: https://dgraph.io/blog/post/putting-it-all-
| together-part1/
|
| Here it says 7 comments. But you only get to see one. You
| have to click into the discourse post to get more. This
| is due to Discourse's threading model. 6 of the comments
| were replying to the one on the blog post itself.
| mrjn wrote:
| Discourse prefers a single level threading model, until
| Reddit or HN. So, you can in fact see all the 7 comments
| there. Not sure why you only see one.
| rectang wrote:
| I see 7 comments when I go to that page. Dig Dgraph fix
| something in the last hour? Or is the site treating you
| differently from me because I'm completely unknown to it?
| foxhop wrote:
| https://www.remarkbox.com
|
| I'm the founder and in 2021, in the face of the Monopolistic
| take over of speach and allowing communities to self-moderate,
| I've made the service free!
|
| Reference:
|
| https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
|
| Worth reading the publicly released statement.
| supz_k wrote:
| Yep, commento is a great self-hosted alternative.
|
| There's also Isso[1] and utterances[2] (Github issues based)
|
| [1] - https://posativ.org/isso/ [2] -
| https://github.com/utterance/utterances
| KajMagnus wrote:
| Talkyard Blog Comments, https://talkyard.io/blog-comments
|
| (I'm developing it. Open source:
| https://github.com/debiki/talkyard. Not yet so well documented
| -- soon time to add more docs, ... as per this nice discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002656 )
| mcorbin wrote:
| i'm the author of Commentator, a commenting system where
| comments are stored on any s3 compatible store (easier to
| manage than a DB or local storage):
| https://github.com/mcorbin/commentator
|
| It's still WIP but it supports comments approval, has a rate
| limiter, a challenge system to avoid spammers... I already use
| it for my personal blog.
| urtrs wrote:
| Remark42 is also good https://github.com/umputun/remark42
| EGreg wrote:
| This is so stupid, by the way. Can't Disqus simply use its OWN
| third party cookie in the back end to inform all these other
| sites and grab their information to display, even cache some of
| it? Disqus is being sloppy and just angering its own "customers"
| is the websites and users.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've seen suggested before that third-party tracking is used to
| validate results and prevent self-dealing and fraud.
|
| When your primary function is counting things, trusting the
| tallymen is critical. Multiple independent counts addresses
| this.
|
| How true this is I don't know.
|
| Dispensing with the counting avoids this need.
| clairegraham wrote:
| We used to have Disqus on our site and I can attest to it being a
| resource hog. We switched to Commento last year, which doesn't
| have as many features, but it shaved seconds off our page load
| time.
|
| My only complaint with Commento was that automated moderating /
| spam filtering worked better in Disqus than Commento.
| throw8932894 wrote:
| Is there a way to use github for commenting system? I have a site
| hosted on github, most users are devs...
| kidscancode wrote:
| I've just switched from using Disqus to this type of setup. I
| create a GH issue for each post, and then pull comments using
| the Github API. This article has a great overview of how it can
| work: http://donw.io/post/github-comments/
| ohduran wrote:
| utterances! https://github.com/utterance/utterances
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| I've been around long enough to have seen how comments on the Web
| emerged from innocuous guest books and a feature in personal
| blogging and ended up being un-ironically slapped to any 5-line
| piece of content.
|
| Disqus and their ilk exist because of one reason only:
| convenience.
|
| (a) You don't need to install software and a database to store
| comments, (b) you don't need to maintain that software or worry
| that it's an attack vector (c) you don't need to pay for hosting
| and (d) you don't need to worry about comment spam.
|
| While that's all valid, I feel a moral question lurks beneath the
| surface.
|
| If you host a website, you are establishing a bond of trust with
| visitors. And your visitors can and will hold you accountable for
| the experience you offer. A foundational principle and the
| promise of the Web was (and still is) that information is shared
| in an equitable fashion. That doesn't mean you have to serve
| content for free or peanuts (there's nothing wrong with paid
| content). It does mean that no matter what you do, you can never
| outsource responsibility over what you put on line.
|
| This pertains both to functionality as well as the content
| itself.
|
| Companies like Disqus have jumped into a niche: removing the
| costs (time / money) of self-hosting and managing comments. It's
| totally fine to pull their infrastructure into your own website
| via - ultimately - an <iframe> tag. But you do have a
| responsibility towards your visitors to do your due diligence and
| assert that the services you're relying on won't compromise your
| own bond of trust with your visitors.
|
| Asserting that due diligence is a big issue. Not everyone is
| doing this, and enough companies and individuals will shirk their
| responsibility for the sake of convenience and costs. Over the
| past 15 years, the Web has become riddled with embeds, widgets
| and iframes. It's not just Disqus, it's literally any copy-and-
| paste code which people add in matter-of-factly without
| considering the consequences.
|
| WordPress, for instance, offers oembed support out of the box.
| Drop in a YouTube or Instagram link and it will automagically
| transform into a widget. Extremely convenient, but it's an open
| door for trackers.
|
| https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/
|
| This leaves you, as a visitor of websites, in a bind: you can't
| trust websites to not have a tracker
|
| In the EU, that's where the GDPR does make a difference. If you
| want to be compliant, you will need to either jump through
| several technical hoops to give your visitors the possibility to
| opt-out of trackers... or you simply stop relying on third-party
| embeds all together since they now pose a legal liability.
|
| In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment box
| on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now
| considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you
| provide them with insights in how you manage their comments.
|
| The GDPR is actively enforced and companies and individuals do
| get fined for not adhering to the rules.
|
| https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
| https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights
| tleb_ wrote:
| > In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment
| box on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now
| considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you
| provide them with insights in how you manage their comments.
|
| Not if you don't store any personal data ("any information
| relating to an identified or identifiable natural person" as
| per the GDPR). If you just provide pseudonym and message
| fields, you have no issue. This is in the spirit of "data
| minimisation".
|
| The other alternative is of course to remove the comment box
| and provide some contact info. Works well but people might not
| be as keen on sending something.
| pawurb wrote:
| I've stopped using Disqus on my blog for exactly the reasons
| described. I've switched to https://commento.io/ and the site
| started loading noticably faster.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Every time I see Disqus on a site I wonder why people use it.
| The page load lag alone is bad enough.
| darekkay wrote:
| It's free, easy to integrate, many people already have an
| account. Those were the reasons for me. But in the end, the
| drawbacks were enough for me to remove Disqus.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I am struggling to understand why anybody thought that
| "outsourcing" blog comments was a good idea. It seems like a
| really simple database function that could be self hosted easily.
| breischl wrote:
| When you want to do voting, moderation, new/hot/etc, handle
| potentially large loads, it can get to be a lot. Also, if you
| don't want anonymous commenters (because that contributes to
| spam and bad community) you get into the entire user/password
| management mess. Particularly if you're just some guy that
| wanted to blog stuff, rather than a content-centric media
| corporation. Plus there's some potential benefit to having a
| consistent identity across different sites.
|
| FWIW, Facebook was doing the exact same thing. I think they
| still do, though I don't see it as much.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I don't know about in the past, but a lot of devs are big on
| static sites now. Comments require the overhead of a server.
| polevaultweb wrote:
| I'm using ReplyBox on all my sites and client sites, it's a
| lightweight and slick alternative https://getreplybox.com/
| atomicson wrote:
| We forget, the main reason we post a comment is to be read by
| others. So there's nothing wrong because it is "you" wrote the
| comments and it is "you". Sure you already read their Terms of
| Service (ToS) before embedding their product in your website.
| There is no free lunch as there are some costs to develop and
| maintain a product. If you are a coder, develop your own
| commenting system is not hard. They just do what they do for
| survival, like everybody else.
| eliben wrote:
| Turned off Disqus on my blog a couple of years ago
| (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...)
| and have been generally happy since then.
| kevincox wrote:
| I also recently turned it off. I had gotten a couple of
| comments in the past but my blog is quite low-traffic. Mostly a
| place for me to practice writing (and occasionally vent).
| However I did like the simplicity of Disqus. I tried looking
| around for something similar with the following requirements:
|
| - No third party code on my domain. - Minimal code to write
| myself.
|
| Most of these tools work using an iframe, so the code that they
| run on your domain is minimal but they end up loading as a
| script that injects the iframe. AFAICT the primary reason for
| this is is so that they can adjust the height of the iframe
| automatically. In some cases I could pull a pinned version of
| that API from NPM or similar however it would be nice if there
| was a truly minimal snippet that I could use.
|
| It also makes me wonder, if iframes could have a dynamic height
| would this ecosystem flourish?
|
| In the end I just added links at the bottom of each post to
| search for mentions on Reddit/Twitter and another link to share
| the post there. I then use a WebMentions bridge to collect
| responses. Right now I haven't published the code that displays
| WebMentions automatically but I might do that in the future.
| matgillard wrote:
| "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the
| product being sold."
| roelschroeven wrote:
| If you are paying for it, you are the customer, and you're
| still being sold. From the article:
|
| > When you provide a free product, money should come from
| somewhere. Disqus uses advertising for that. Now, I subscribed
| to a paid plan trial of Disqus to see if things change or not.
| No! Even in the paid plans, the same pixels are loaded on the
| client-side.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| True about if something is free, you are the product. Like this
| article made available for free written by a competitor to
| disqus.
| CA0DA wrote:
| From a month ago: "Adding comments to a static blog with
| Mastodon"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
| xfz wrote:
| Title should probably have [Advert] prefix or something.
|
| That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general
| cleanup and I'm glad I did.
|
| The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly
| for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like
| subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as
| a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model
| relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case
| selling the processing of data).
| matsemann wrote:
| > _I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and
| I 'm glad I did._
|
| Yeah, their data breach exposing mine and 18 million other's
| accounts made it the last time I used them.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I try not to say what might embarrass myself later, but I did
| use my email to create a disqus account to talk politics,
| which is always touchy. I got banned for a couple weeks once
| for telling someone to eff off after they said they looked
| forward to seeing liberals, gays and Jews shot in the street.
| Go figure.
| EGreg wrote:
| We've been saying that for years, but nothing gets done.
|
| My team and I went ahead to describe how it will work, and will
| be releasing it in 2022 after building it openly on GitHub:
|
| https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...
|
| But watch the silent downvotes for this comment... and this is
| part of the reason why it won't happen unless someone braves
| ridicule even of the very technologists who are supposedly for
| it.
|
| There are many reasons to be skeptical, the biggest of which is
| that ads pay more (for now) than micropayments for digital
| content. But that's not why stuff like this gets downvoted.
| It's because the economics of capitalism make it so that you
| either have to be a big company with a huge fund behind the
| push for some micropayment standard, or you are not taken
| seriously.
| nexthash wrote:
| Your whitepaper promises an all-in-one utopian
| decentralization panacea for the Internet. On top of that you
| are piggybacking off of unsubstantiated crypto hype, even
| though cryptocurrencies have many problems (including lack of
| trust/recourse between parties due to decentralization). That
| might contribute to the reason you are finding no traction
| for your idea.
| gidan wrote:
| If you want a serious paid alternative, there is
| graphcomment.com, the design is very neat, the team is very
| responsive to their user base. It's still a human sized
| company. (Disclaimer: have been working for that company in the
| past)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Spotify relies on monopolizing your listening data. You should
| avoid it on the same premise. Delivering music is easy; their
| unique offering is the recommendation engine. There's no
| competition because there's no open listening data. If we could
| make it open, then you could have actual competition in the
| space (coincidentlly Spotify recommendations aren't great at
| the moment).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This reminds me I need to find an open source scrobbler
| compatible with Lastfm's API.
| hnra wrote:
| Does any other service deliver music and podcasts at a much
| lower price then?
| sofixa wrote:
| Plenty of alternatives exist - YouTube Premium ( which also
| gets you YouTube with no adds, on top of YouTube Music),
| Amazon Music, Apple Music, and iirc pandora, SoundCloud? I
| haven't compared prices.
| airstrike wrote:
| Can't really suggest YT as an alternative to a monopoly
| throwaways885 wrote:
| Is either company a monopoly in "music streaming" if
| they're both viable alternatives?
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| So, your suggested alternative to avoid data
| monopolization is to use a FAANG (with a worse product)?
| I accept that those are alternatives, but no thanks.
|
| Pandora has been geo-blocked and IIRC only serves the USA
| since 2007, and SoundCloud appears to me to be offering a
| different service.
| stonesweep wrote:
| Shoutcast/Icecast are alive and well, there are thousands
| of independent radio stations online; one of the most well
| known (SomaFM) is alive and well, ad free listener
| supported. Big Sonic Heaven is still online, both of these
| are like 20 years and running.
|
| Lots of podcasts are free from their source, Spotify
| doesn't even offer one of favorite ones (a weekly DJ mix,
| 500+ episodes strong) all you need is an app like
| AntennaPod (Android).
| tupshin wrote:
| In that vein, I'd suggest Radio Paradise. Also add free,
| listener supported, and has been streaming amazing mixes
| for over 20 years.
|
| https://radioparadise.com/
| porsupah wrote:
| Likewise, you might enjoy:
|
| CHIRP Radio (Chicago): https://chirpradio.org 4ZZZ
| (Brisbane): https://www.4zzzfm.org.au
|
| Both are ad-free, other than local community orgs and the
| occasional local independent business plug, and funded by
| listener donations. Big bonus: huge variety in their
| playlists, with the DJs playing whatever they feel like.
| stonesweep wrote:
| Thank you for the reverse share! Much appreciated, ill
| give it a listen here in a bit (6am here :) ). In return,
| my podcast mentioned above is Resident - Hernan Cattaneo,
| podcast.hernancattaneo.com - weekly new progressive house
| music mixes.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > all you need is an app like AntennaPod
|
| To listen to a podcast? A podcast is an audio file you
| download like any other file and play like any other
| audio file. Why do you need a dedicated app?
| SSLy wrote:
| As all the successful technology, convenience.
| stonesweep wrote:
| What SSLy said. For the same reason I have a single app
| which plays all my shoutcast streams with one button
| click, the same reason I don't type SMTP/IMAP commands
| manually or read RSS feed xml with in vim. These are not
| "Dedicated apps", they are generically useful software
| applications. Spotify is a Dedicated App.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On many podcasts now, this is increasingly obfuscated or
| hidden:
|
| - There is no dedicated podcast homepage, only a set of
| service links (Spotify, Itunes, etc.).
|
| - RSS itself may not be provided.
|
| - Audio is hidden inside Javascript requests.
|
| I _do_ listen to many podcasts by going to a page and
| finding the single-episode download link,and playing that
| directly via mpv or other CLI tools. Success rate is
| falling, seems to be ~75% or so anecdotally. Often I 'll
| curl the page, explode elements to one per line, and grep
| for '\\.mp3' references. Even that fails often.
|
| And yes, I use dedicated podcast apps to subscribe
| specifically, but I don't want or need to subscribe to
| every last podcast just to listen to a single episode.
|
| Open standards promote interoperability. Profit comes by
| building walls and moats.
|
| Profit seems to be winning.
| vel0city wrote:
| One can browse the web by telnet and issuing HTTP
| requests directly or sending emails with `mail`, but its
| usually a bit smoother of an experience using a web
| browser or email client.
|
| I use a podcast app to favorite the RSS feeds of podcasts
| and other content. It then keeps track of which entries
| are new, can automatically download those new ones, and
| keep track of what I've already listened to. It makes it
| a lot easier than manually looking at the RSS feeds and
| downloading the files by hand.
| Tallain wrote:
| I believe the price is similar, but Deezer[0] has a decent
| music library plus podcasts. Its recommendation engine also
| works a little differently. The "Flow" engine lets you
| listen as a radio station with known and unknown tracks
| thrown in with actually decent recommendations.
|
| Much better than Spotify, which only ever "recommended"
| artists I've already listened to, or artists I didn't like,
| or genres I didn't. If you listen to a wide variety of
| music, it doesn't know how to handle this apparently.
|
| [0]: https://www.deezer.com/us/
| SSLy wrote:
| >There's no competition because there's no open listening
| data.
|
| https://listenbrainz.org/
| dmos62 wrote:
| Ironically, the page doesn't seem to load for me, but then
| loads after a delay of 5-10 seconds.
| nexthash wrote:
| In my opinion, having to shell out small bits of money every
| time you hit a paywall on the Internet is just as bad as having
| your data sold. I wish there was a viable pay-once-for-all
| alternative to microservices for the Web, possibly even
| integrated with your Internet service provider bill.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Ah yes, let's go back to the cable paradigm, where I pay for
| four different versions of ESPN just because I want to watch
| Comedy Central.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I miss the golden age of blogs, bulletin boards, and of mailing
| lists, frankly. They are still out there, of course, but focus
| seems to have shifted. Twitter is so much more immediate, and I
| think it has displaced blog post consumption. To our detriment in
| many ways.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Where are all the defenders claiming this is all necessary and
| great because it enables superior advertising? Whenever we have a
| Google or Facebook they always seem to crawl out of the woodwork,
| no love for the small businesses which rely on advertising here?
| ivolimmen wrote:
| 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.
| dmortin wrote:
| > 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 problem is not everyone has the means to pay for
| everything.
|
| E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid
| only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can
| help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation
| better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't
| afford Youtube's fee.
| clairegraham wrote:
| Commento.io is a very simple alternative that costs $10/month.
| We use that on downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use
|
| The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Yes. And the 'paid so you are the customer, not the product'
| thing has limits. That was one of the original value
| propositions of cable television, but it turns out to be more
| profitable to get a platform monopoly and then sell ads _as
| well as_ charging a fee.
|
| Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's
| certainly not sufficient.
| tal8d wrote:
| 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, despite
| all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-
| supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I
| really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get
| wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying
| noise.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I certainly remember when most blogs were about sharing and
| not making money. Still, the explosion of tutorials, how tos,
| cooking lessons, math lessons, science shows, etc on youtube
| is all arguably because there is a money incentive. The bad
| parts of youtube (leading to conspiracy videos/fake news) are
| bad but the good parts (the large number of relatively well
| produced indie content) feels to me to be pretty awesome and
| that's arguably because of money.
|
| On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have
| no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself.
|
| I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually
| sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I
| have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will
| degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog
| posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm
| rep.
|
| note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of
| people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying
| that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about
| sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a
| phenomenon
| spicyramen wrote:
| 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.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| 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.
| geek_at wrote:
| 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 5EUR/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
| duckmysick wrote:
| Can't a person write interesting stuff on
| Medium/Blogspot/Wordpress? Telling a person, who wants to
| blog about fruit preserves, to learn php and selfhost is
| a bit too much.
| tal8d wrote:
| heh, I had a little project hosted on an nslu2 wedged
| between the water heater and the wall of my utility
| closet. Never had a problem, even after several major
| sites picked up on it the same day, because responding to
| get requests for static files isn't hard. Thankfully,
| most sites only become hard to self host after they start
| doing annoying things - like dynamically generating
| oversized embedded junk.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium
| is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large
| audience.
|
| To be honest, this sounds like profit thinking as well.
| Why would one need "wide audience" when it's about their
| interest and hobbies? They need sincere search engines,
| that's all.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Some people are proud of their work and they want to show
| it to others. The more people see it and appreciate it,
| the more validated and important the creators feel.
|
| It's like sending invitations to your birthday party. It
| feels bad when just one person shows up.
|
| > They need sincere search engines, that's all.
|
| What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?
| asdff wrote:
| So what? You can still share your selfhosted blog article
| around the internet. Like the olden days. Or the modern
| days, where right now we are all reading someones
| selfhosted blog that was shared with us without using a
| restrictive platform like Medium. You can offer RSS or
| mailing lists. You don't need all this cruft to fix
| problems that have been solved 20 years ago.
| pmlnr wrote:
| > The more people see it and appreciate it, the more
| validated and important the creators feel.
|
| That is called vanity in one word.
|
| > What exactly are you suggesting to the content
| creators?
|
| If it really is a hobby, one enjoys it on it's own. The
| "showcase" part shouldn't be essential for one to take
| joy in the process.
|
| My recommendation is to find a space where one can share
| what they achieved, but it really doesn't (shouldn't)
| need to be a "wide audience", rather the opposite: a
| group of people who actually enjoy the same things.
| Enthusiasts, maybe even fans.
| duckmysick wrote:
| I wouldn't call it vanity; it's too harsh and unfair. It
| paints people who are enthusiastic about their
| accomplishments in a negative light. People shouldn't be
| ashamed to be proud of their honest work.
|
| Showcasing isn't essential, but it can increase the
| enjoyment and it can benefit the others. That's why we
| have art galleries, trade fairs, talent shows, and Show
| HN threads.
|
| I specifically asked about how "They need sincere search
| engines, that's all." What exactly content creators
| should do about it? Make their own, sacrificing time from
| their main hobby? Maybe one already exists. But then they
| need to tell their potential fans about it. How would
| they contact them? They might not even be aware they
| exist. I guess they could wait until the new sincere
| search engine reaches critical mass. But what until then?
|
| As for the "wide audience", consider this. At one point
| in their lives, fans were part of the wide audience. They
| weren't born fans; they became them over time. So why
| shouldn't the content creators try to capture new fans
| from the larger audience? They don't have to - becoming
| too mainstream is a thing after all. But if they choose
| to do so, why not? Unless you oppose the creators growing
| their fans and popularity, in which case I don't know
| what to say.
| rapnie wrote:
| Sharing your hobby with as many others as possible,
| hoping maybe more people join the fun is not vanity. The
| birthday party analogy has validity too.
| tremon wrote:
| _the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is
| harder for the authors to reach a large audience._
|
| Isn't this is a problem that search engines were intended
| to solve? Before they went into the ad business, I mean?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| People seem to stream more than they'll search.
|
| Google's daily search stats are getting harder to find,
| but with 3.8 billion Internet users and probably a few
| billion searches/day, it's likely single-digit searches
| per person per day, as a mean.
|
| Algorithmic/stream discovery, as on Facebook, or HN, is
| at least an order of magnitude higher.
|
| https://ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-
| day/
| rebuilder wrote:
| The web was that way because there wasn't much profit to be
| made. With enough users, advertising becomes viable and
| becomes the driving factor in content production.
| tal8d wrote:
| That is debatable, but what isn't is the fact that the
| third option exists - which never gets mentioned in the
| tired old "If you don't disable that pesky adblocker -
| you'll be forced to pay!" posts.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Yes, the hobbyist web still exists. But it's hampered by
| the much larger commercial web IMO. The influx of members
| to any non-commercial web community is disturbed by the
| commercial entities that draw so much of the attention
| that to most people, it seems like there isn't anything
| else on the web.
|
| The big fish use up so much oxygen that the little fish
| in the pond shrivel up. They live, but in a stunted form.
| tal8d wrote:
| Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it
| when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy,
| zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging
| ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents...
| what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite
| the machinations of unshriveled fish?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Attention _is_ zero-sum. There are 24 hours in a day.
| People only spend so much time online. There is no bigger
| bag or truck.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Hobbyist stuff still exists. But even back then, you're still
| talking about a small fraction of internet content.
|
| We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend
| warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the
| stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than
| hobby/charity content.
|
| Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era
| you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards.
| You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard
| or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if
| your forum was popular.
|
| I have a feeling every time people talk about the old
| hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire
| websites they themselves never spent all that much time on.
| Most people want better content than that just like most
| people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not
| hobbyists on Youtube.
|
| Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol
| days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on
| Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch
| vlogs, they were boring."
|
| Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when
| there was almost nothing online that we want to do online
| today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s
| with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force
| for why there were compelling things to do online, like
| playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet
| Gaming Zone platform in 1997.
| tal8d wrote:
| These rebuttals always sound like "But if I didn't pay AWS
| $1k/yr I wouldn't be able to host my family photo album
| powered by a 15 stack frame deep Nodejs nosql-backed
| container!"
|
| > We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to
| consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity
| content.
|
| We, huh? The most enriching content you've ever encountered
| on the web, was it churned out by the likes of about.com?
| The places you've had the most meaningful conversations,
| were they on platforms that regularly purge and actively
| censor content they deem not to be advertiser friendly?
| What you are describing sounds a lot more like network
| television to me. If you just want to zone out in front of
| the latest episode of "Dancing with the Stars", you already
| have that option.
|
| I get the kneejerk assumption that if something even
| approaches the potential of being nostalgic, it must be the
| product of delusion. But that really isn't applicable here,
| as we all know the ways that technology and infrastructure
| has been twisted to benefit commercial interests at the
| expense of everyone else.
| spoonjim wrote:
| There are plenty of personal HTML pages out there, probably
| more than in 1997. But the fact is that commercial entities
| have created far more streamlined and addictive experiences.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The web is _still_ full of content that didn 't originate
| from profit motive - you're looking at some - but it's
| wrapped up in and presented on for-profit sites.
|
| The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content
| as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new
| content. And that's much more complicated because it's full
| of perverse incentives.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The web is still full of content that didn't originate
| from profit motive"_
|
| Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes
| such _geek_at_ says he 's had, others have pointed out that
| self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor
| coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This
| stands to reason and it's a damn shame.
|
| It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common
| universally-wide index type site where all the free, no-
| ads, no spying sites would be listed.
|
| Similarity, this index site would be spy-free, no ads and
| free for visitors to use but those listed would pay a small
| listing fee to cover site running costs. To keep listing
| costs to a minimum the site would be non profit, revenue-
| neutral and run as a cooperative society or similar non
| profit structure.
|
| To stop cohersive pressures from commercial interests,
| commercial, for profit sites/businesses would not be
| allowed to list.
|
| The site itself would be indexed and cross referenced along
| topic lines using the Dewey Decimal Classification system
| or similar schemes that libraries use to classify books.
|
| This would have the advantage of grouping
| likemined/likekind websites together in ways that were easy
| for visitors to browse from one to another. The listing for
| each site could also include a short description.
|
| This index site would cover just about every topic
| imaginable and thus attract many sites for listing which
| would provide economies of scale. For example:
|
| - Trades/Woodworking/Cabinetmaking
|
| - Science/Physics/QM/Quantum Field Theory/Yang-Mills
|
| - Philosophy/Utilitarianism/Jeremy Bentham
|
| Right, the site could easily contain interests as diverse
| as any book library, and it could even have its own
| internal search engine.
|
| It seems to me that we desperately need such an independant
| nonprofit site on the web. It's our only reasonable hope of
| escaping the centralization created by Facebook, Google,
| etc.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Ooh, a taxonomy! Haven't had one of those since the death
| of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory
|
| (these are popular with library nerds, but in practice
| the public wants a constant feed of links + discussion in
| some form, whether that's slashdot, digg, reddit, or
| twitter)
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, I only mentioned Dewey to illustrate my point
| since it's likely the best known. Of course there are
| many others such as Universal, Library of Congress, etc.,
| etc. I'm not saying that any of these are suitable for
| the site I'm suggesting, perhaps we need to pinch the
| best ideas from each and tailor a new version
| specifically for the web.
|
| What I will say is that taxonomy and classification
| systems in general are problematic and have always been
| so. Anyone who has ever tried to sort and classify stuff
| knows this! I'm forever sorting the myriad of stuff on my
| PCs, smartphones, etc. into various classifications and
| then into appropriately named directories and it's an
| ongoing struggle.
|
| If I dream up too few classifications then I end up with
| directories that don't have sufficiently specific names
| to find things, too many and I'll lose items in
| directories whose names that are a near match but not
| sufficiently so. If I ignore the obvious
| catalog/directory naming system and use a program such as
| Everything that finds stuff anywhere based on name then
| I'll lose the ability to browse (grouped) like subjects
| as their names won't necessarily be sufficiently alike.
| It's all a damn nuisance really.
|
| Then there's the problem of what you classify by:
| subject, or author's name or physical object (a major
| problem in a general purpose catalog).
|
| I could write an essay about nomenclature and how it's a
| significant problem for the web and IT generally. For
| instance, if people were a little more knowledgeable
| about taxonomy and classification in general - and that
| includes both general web users and website owners - then
| Google could be spared millions in electricity costs due
| to much more accurate search results first time around.
|
| That said, existing classification systems have their
| uses even in days where electronic sorting has come into
| its own. Take a physical book library for instance, I'll
| check out some subject in the catalog index then go to
| the book in question - and, as more often than not, I'll
| browse many of the nearby books on the same subject. The
| fact that they're grouped together by subject is very
| useful. If they were grouped alphabetically then this
| would not be possible.
|
| I take your point that in practice the public's constant
| need for links, discussion etc. However, I don't see this
| as inconsistent with what I've suggested, especially so
| if one doesn't take a one-system-fits-all approach as is
| so often the case not only on the web but with software
| in general.
|
| For instance, with Windows 8 when Microsoft moved away
| from the traditional IBM/CUA-like GUI to its new Metro
| GUI, it didn't allow users a choice to retain the old
| GUI. This programmer-know-best arrogrance permeates both
| software and the web like a bad smell and it does nobody
| any good.
|
| I see no reason why the site I'm suggesting can't have
| multiple methods of access. The Dewey-type, search a la
| Everything, and also those along the lines you've
| suggested. Moreover, there's no reason it cannot have
| user comments in the same way Hacker News does.
|
| The key to its success would be in having wide appeal -
| by providing both casual and sophisticated users a
| service suitable for each. As the saying goes, to each
| according to his/her needs.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Hosting, curating, and moderating Hacker News is certainly
| adjacent to YC's business and ostensibly has some profit
| motive. I appreciate that it's also a dark-pattern-free
| public service, but it's not a coincidence that one of the
| best tech news and discussion boards is hosted by one of
| the premier incubator/accelerator shops.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| 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.
| mhb wrote:
| Just a minor quibble about the Kindle since I'm very
| appreciative that there is a choice of buying one with or
| without ads.
| a_imho wrote:
| Disagree. Imo most content is basically throwaway entertainment
| (especially social media) thus very interchangeable and has
| very little value. The internet is simply not that important.
| baxtr wrote:
| I think this really depends on your moral compass. It's not
| solely a matter of your business model. I don't want to start
| paying for everything I want to read on the 50 pages I browse
| per week.
| yborg wrote:
| 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.
| strogonoff wrote:
| 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
| practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a
| giant that doesn't charge money and is incentivised to keep
| users locked in by making migration to another service
| difficult.
| orangepanda wrote:
| > 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.
| Un1corn wrote:
| >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
| DelightOne wrote:
| And where do they get this information from.. only a few
| news sites pick stuff like this up. Do the relevant users
| have this news site open at the correct hour to catch it?
| Likely not.
|
| Most news is not actionable for the person reading it,
| except for popular apps where there are most users. The
| information needs to get to the right people at the right
| time to be actionable.
| strogonoff wrote:
| People do and people do. The first person to jump on this
| will get thousands of retweets in publicity as others
| pile on to get justice.
|
| Of course, there's no "justice" to speak of if you get
| stuff for free, so paid social is where it's at. Paying
| customer to service provider relationship is radically
| different from one of a product-to-dealer.
|
| Normalising free service is exactly what incumbent de-
| facto monopolies want, it empowers them and destroys any
| potential for competition. They hate paying users because
| that'd mean actual responsibility and people voting with
| their money.
| unicornporn wrote:
| 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.
| Talanes wrote:
| 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.
| unicornporn wrote:
| 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
|
| More on this:
|
| https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=
| htt...
|
| https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=
| htt...
| bachmeier wrote:
| > 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 see what you're saying, but you're referring to
| something like a "market-based solution" to this problem.
| The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have.
| This is a case of imperfect information. There's no
| reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a
| desirable outcome when one party has so much more
| information than the other.
| spijdar wrote:
| Even that may not be enough - the article mentions this, and
| points out that even the paid version of Disqus includes these
| trackers.
|
| Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even
| paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and
| tracking, since providers can always make even more off both
| subscriptions and tracking...
| pfranz wrote:
| I already think that has happened for companies and startups,
| but I don't think much progress at all has been made for
| individuals.
|
| I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on
| ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small
| transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20
| years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional
| credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it
| technically could work, but I don't see that happening.
|
| One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled
| under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches
| transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on
| small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon
| seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a
| centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to
| use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual
| companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or
| letting you cancel.
|
| How do you see the money side playing out?
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads ...
| Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I
| don't see that happening.
|
| Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law:
| advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies
| (mostly) do.
|
| If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data,
| you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if
| they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some
| hacker-magnet database, or any of that.
|
| If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do
| all of that.
|
| The problem isn't a business problem or a technological
| problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double
| standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance
| monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can
| be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected
| without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty"
| allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for
| cryptocurrencies.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| AML: anti-money laundering
|
| KYC: know your customers
| pfranz wrote:
| The use case I was thinking of for individuals is more like
| paying a nickel to read an article. I'm not really familiar
| with AML/KYC requirements, but I'm not sure I see the need.
| I would imagine most people would want a basic account so
| they could revisit paid content later. Any laundering would
| get caught looking at your business' finances (what you do
| with the money) or tracking crypto accounts in a more
| traditional manor.
|
| I've used cryptocurrencies here and there for online
| services (merch and digital services) and don't remember
| any additional scrutiny. I reasons I had in mind are the
| confusion and overhead of using crypto for the average
| person.
|
| I guess if there were some regulatory requirements in a
| made-up "ideal" scenario, I would see it mirroring existing
| banks and credit cards where your source wallet was from a
| "sanctioned" account to track location for local taxes and
| whatnot. The onus wouldn't be put on the business other
| than having an allowlist (by prefix or something)--but none
| of that exists. I would think a lot more structure an
| institutions would need to exist anyway to make
| cryptocurrencies more palatable to individuals.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Brave got a tap on the shoulder from the government and
| was told they had to collect all that data in order to
| release crypto payments to the owners of the websites
| they'd been collecting micropayments for:
|
| https://preview.redd.it/52bkflf0cld31.jpg?width=462&forma
| t=p...
|
| https://support.brave.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
|
| I disagree with a lot of Brave's approach. However their
| experience shows that this problem isn't theoretical. One
| company has already managed to deliver frictionless
| micropayments, and was told by the government that if
| they didn't add some friction back in (AML/KYC),
| executives would be going to prison.
|
| Not cool.
|
| This also led to a real mess with the operators of
| archive.today, who don't live in the USA and apparently
| aren't supported by the AML/KYC process being used. So a
| fairly large amount of money collected in order to
| support them is stuck and can't be paid out:
|
| https://blog.archive.today/post/626174398020403200/please
| -pr...
| foxhop wrote:
| If you are looking for a free hosted comment system, check out
| Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com
|
| I'm the founder and in 2021, the service is now Free for all to
| use.
|
| Check out my reasons for opening up the service to all here:
| https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
|
| Big Tech must NOT have a monopoly on moderation!
| foolinaround wrote:
| how do you generate revenue to sustain this service?
| outsomnia wrote:
| Article only makes it clear at the end that it is an ad for
| author's "privacy first" competitor... which is a paid-for
| product.
| scubbo wrote:
| And? The article _starts_ with the point that "if the product
| is free, you are the product". Shouldn't we therefore _prefer_
| a paid-for model, which must demonstrate its value in
| competition with similar competitors (for instance, by
| protecting privacy better?)
|
| Not all free markets are bad (though many are, and many are
| less free than they appear). A good free product is good, but I
| would rather a good not-free one than a bad free one.
| outsomnia wrote:
| > And?
|
| ... and I won't read these fake advertorials if I don't get
| cheated into reading them by witholding the admission about
| what they are until the end.
|
| I don't want to be lectured about Dark Patterns by a guy who
| deliberately misled me as his first and only interaction with
| me.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I agree. It is frustrating because it is otherwise a good
| article and likely accurate.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| It's like that Social Dilemma movie which is 100% based on
| the tactics of fear and engagement generation it ascribes
| to social network.
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| By they way, you're not paying for Hacker News the last time
| I checked.
|
| "If the product is free you're the product" is such a blatant
| statement people throw around like they don't have to prove
| their point anymore.
| hobofan wrote:
| Still holds for HN.
|
| Our attention towards HN (and with that YC, it's
| accelerators and its startups) is the product. That's
| rather benign compared to most other "free" products, but
| it's still true.
| blackcats wrote:
| This is why I dropped disqus and made my own comment system
|
| https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Once, a number of years ago (Disqus has been around a while), I
| signed up for a Disqus account.
|
| As part of the process, the service showed me a page of comments
| from around the Web, and asked if they were mine, and, if so,
| would I like to associate them with the account.
|
| I was horrified. They included some... _rather "rash"_ comments
| that I had made, over the years (I was not always the stuffy
| boomer that I am now). Many were quite old, and, I had thought,
| made anonymously.
|
| I scragged the process immediately, and made a vow to be a good
| boy, from then on (I had already made that choice, years earlier,
| but this solidified it).
|
| Nowadays, I deliberately associate myself with my online
| comments. I nuked my last anonymous account years ago.
|
| It is my opinion that anonymity is an illusion, these days. I
| feel that knowing my words can come back to haunt me, helps me to
| be more careful in what I say; just like in real life.
| jwr wrote:
| This is so amusing to me -- I remember when Disqus was being
| built and beginning to gain traction, lofty ideas of "comments
| and discussions done right" were being thrown around.
|
| I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I
| want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a
| third party, becoming tied to them and all the data
| tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future.
|
| Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-)
|
| Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something
| is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write
| articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or
| Google+, remember that?).
| chrisMyzel wrote:
| "disqusting" - thanks for the article!
| throw14082020 wrote:
| 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.
| spinningslate wrote:
| I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I
| get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue -
| so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive.
|
| On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern,
| privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay
| for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for
| hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other
| services if they're valuable to us?
|
| A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's
| positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free
| is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!".
|
| "Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put
| back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy
| invasion and refuse to pay for stuff.
|
| [0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-
| privacy-...
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _It 's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or
| internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if
| they're valuable to us?_
|
| 1. Too many separate subscriptions become hard to manage.
| Example: the banks in my country don't allow direct access of
| my account movements to any budgeting apps so I have to tally
| everything manually because I want to track my expenses.
| There is a business idea here somewhere: a subscription
| aggregator or some such, where you can manage a total
| subscription budget per month and be able to cut a service
| easily (which is of course strongly against the interests of
| those you subscribed to).
|
| 2. Cynicism. I have physically met and conversed with people
| working in ad-tech. They have _zero_ scruples. If you pay for
| a service these people will laugh at you, collect your money
| and then proceed to inject trackers and huge banners in the
| website /app with no regard that you paid for the service.
| You don't magically disappear from tracking once you pay.
| That's sadly a myth. Your narrative is correct on its surface
| but it was perverted and abused.
|
| ---
|
| I agree that the free tier services is like running a charity
| and not everyone feels like they have to. There is a business
| opportunity for a better model of free trials and NOT to
| automatically subscribe you after a week or a month. Whether
| that new model is in the financial interest of the
| gatekeepers (Apple / Google and the apps in their stores) is
| another discussion entirely, though.
|
| ---
|
| Finally, I am OK paying a few more bucks a month to my ISP.
| So let all those services figure out a way to charge the
| ISPs. I'll gladly pay anywhere from $5 to $50 extra a month
| for everything that I consumed that is viewed as non-free.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Paypal can manage subscriptions and cut them off just don't
| expect them to give your money back in a timely fashion. I
| got ripped off by the New York Times glitchy interactions
| and it took months to give some of the money back.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yes, that's the problem right there -- incredible amount
| of dark patterns when you just want to unsub. This puts
| me off and I skipped a good amount of subs to popular
| services because of these horror stories.
|
| That, plus PayPal is ripping you off with currency
| conversions.
| hobofan wrote:
| I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product
| I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at
| the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle.
|
| I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g.
| for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold)
| users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also
| set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards
| financing free accounts.
|
| I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't
| really been able to find any good examples for that.
| protoduction wrote:
| So it depends a bit on what you are hosting, but a real
| concern for myself at least is the value that free users
| bring to your service.
|
| I'm not talking about the costs of running your service to
| support them, but everything else. A part of your free
| userbase will expect the world for free and start demanding
| more, and as they outnumber your paid users by so much it
| can just be a huge distraction. The question is how many of
| these free users will convert to paying users?
|
| I personally add a free tier to my products because I want
| to make the tool accessible to hobby and other small
| projects without a budget, but it's probably not a good
| business decision.
|
| Something I've been considering: charge some small one-time
| payment, say $10, for a lifetime 'try-out' plan. Then when
| they want to upgrade to a subscription you give them that
| $10 as a discount for their subscription. It may filter
| those users that will never upgrade anyway.
| foxhop wrote:
| Check out the pay-want-you-can model.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| "Free" can't indeed be put back in its cage, but this would
| also apply to real-life, and yet the majority of people don't
| go out stealing/robbing people even though it would
| technically allow them to get goods for free that they
| otherwise would need to pay for.
|
| The problem isn't advertising in itself. The problem is that
| the law hasn't caught up (or doesn't _want_ to catch up,
| thanks to corruption /lobbying by vested interests) with
| cracking down on large-scale non-consensual data collection
| (which we used to call spyware).
|
| Ads are fine. The problem is that apparently ads don't pay
| enough and the advertising/data collection industry is
| engaging in unethical and potentially illegal practices of
| large-scale stalking (without informed consent) to try and
| get extra money.
| clairity wrote:
| > "The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough..."
|
| ads pay plenty, just look at the size of google and
| facebook (granted, they've together largely consolidated
| the online advertising market, but it's still huge). greed
| is the simpler answer here.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| > _But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy
| invasion and refuse to pay for stuff._
|
| False choice. It doesn't have to be one or the other. There
| are other options: like do some work and host it yourself...
| or something that is publicly paid for, or something that is
| made available for free as open source which can be setup by
| the users themselves, or some generous person volunteering
| their service for free.
| sofixa wrote:
| > We'll pay for hosting
|
| Will we? Most personal websites i know of, including my own,
| fit perfectly within the free tiers of
| Netlify/Vercel/Firebase/S3+CloudFront/GitHub Pages/etc.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The cost of a commenting system is not in hosting, it's in
| moderation.
| foxhop wrote:
| And that cost falls squarely on the site owner not the
| comment service. Moderation may be as expensive or as
| cheap as you make it.
|
| Big Tech is spending a lot of money on it, thousands of
| people and jobs and algorithms.
|
| If you ask me, it's a fools errand and I hope that they
| waste their money trying to build a clean Internet.
|
| Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-
| pay-what-you-can....
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I don't know the rules for Disqus but I expect that they
| impose at least some limits to block bots and spam, which
| is almost impossible to achieve for a small site.
| foxhop wrote:
| Check out akismet, it works for wordpress and is likely
| all you need to divide spam from ham during moderation.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark
| pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people
| won 't pay for stuff._
|
| Not only for that. Also because they can make extra money off
| of it.
|
| So no reason to not have "shady, dark pattern, privacy
| killers" even to services your customers pay for.
|
| It's because of a focus on quality and responsibility that
| you don't do it, not because "we already make money since our
| service is non-free, so let's leave the extra ad money on the
| table".
| foxhop wrote:
| It's more fulfilling to offer the service for free than to
| have a handful of paying customers and watch the world fall
| into a monopoly of moderation by Big Tech.
|
| My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried
| to sell it to people.
|
| Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-
| what-you-can....
| MisterTea wrote:
| Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random
| people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for
| them? I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds
| technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the
| need to waste time moderating trash comments.
|
| Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain
| something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades
| such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and
| one I frequently see, broken English asking the author
| something like "please explaining how to building [complex
| thing] using circuit you post". I picture that last one coming
| from the "engineers" who build those hazardous off-the-line
| chargers you see at gas station check out counters.
|
| Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away._
|
| The common alternative these days is to have no comment
| section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to
| Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there.
|
| That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog,
| but with greater potential network effects, and no
| tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's
| comments.
| MisterTea wrote:
| You make a good point I should have added. Outsource the
| community to an external platform and let someone else
| handle the comments, spam, moderation, etc.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yes, but then your community becomes subject to the whims
| of Twitter/Reddit/etc.
|
| I've been feeling it these days, helping my spouse with
| their art career.
| nickjj wrote:
| > I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds
| technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly
| the need to waste time moderating trash comments.
|
| I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has
| thousands of comments.
|
| I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is),
| and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus
| does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes
| you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you
| checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just
| trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely
| happen.
|
| I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and
| sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice
| to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed.
| It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content.
|
| I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500
| comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker).
| The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks,
| worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks
| asking for tech support because it didn't work for them.
| Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover
| some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker
| directly.
|
| I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out
| there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to
| end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate,
| keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in
| between.
| foxhop wrote:
| I can help you import your users and comments into
| Remarkbox if you like to move your community.
| nickjj wrote:
| Thanks a lot for the offer but I think I'm going to
| decline for now. It's nothing personal or even related to
| your comment service specifically.
|
| For the sake of transparency here's the questions going
| through my mind and how I arrived at this decision based
| on using the free version of Disqus:
|
| - A lot of people have a Disqus account and having a low
| barrier of entry to comment is important. When most folks
| don't need to create an account, that's kind of nice.
|
| - Disqus has been around for a really long time and has
| handled billions of comments. This gives me confidence
| the service isn't going to be down for maintenance
| regularly, or just break one day.
|
| - Disqus has a pretty good spam filter due to having so
| much volume. I would rather not be bothered by having to
| do manual spam moderation regularly and if I hooked up a
| 3rd party service to do that I would end up either having
| to pay for that, or you're still allowing another company
| to profit from your data.
|
| - Disqus makes it pretty easy to moderate comments. You
| get notified of a new comment by email, click it, and
| then hit a drop down and figure out how you want to
| moderate it.
|
| - Most developers are using some form of ad-blocker so
| Disqus' invasive ads are stopped. Although Disqus can
| still read the contents of the comments and profit from
| them in other ways (improve services around paid
| offerings, maybe selling the data to other companies
| doing ML around written text, etc.).
|
| To be fair this is also why I haven't picked any semi-
| popular open source self hosted comment solutions. I
| wouldn't mind self hosting it alongside my blog on a $5 /
| month DigitalOcean server, but all of my objections apply
| to this as well. And now there's also the added risk of
| the code having security vulnerabilities that could
| potentially expose my server or even worse leak personal
| data from the people who have commented, such as their
| email address.
|
| I could write the code myself which I've thought about
| for a while too, but the spam problem is still there.
| There's also allocating all of the time necessary to
| implement such a thing in a production ready way. When
| really all I want to do is create new blog posts / videos
| and have a way for folks to contribute to the
| conversation in a persisted way.
| foxhop wrote:
| Cool. Thanks for the feedback.
|
| Most of the objections have been solved with Remarkbox.
| Users do not need an account to comment. We email you
| when new comments happens you can control how often by
| modifying your notification settings (immediately, daily,
| weekly digests)
|
| The population of people with ad blockers is low, for
| example I'm a tech person but I do not use ad-blockers.
|
| I hope you reconsider, I'd offer you white glove support
| to move.
|
| As for spam it's not much of an issue on Remarkbox, but
| if it becomes a problem akismet will be integrated so you
| can apply your own API keys. This will filter the likely
| spam from the likely ham.
|
| Have a great day!
| MikeTaylor wrote:
| The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a
| community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in
| the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both
| of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one
| of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a
| palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful
| readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-
| author did not. See for example
| https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-
| an-...
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Just yesterday I went though a Kubernetes tutorial and hung
| up on one step, others in the comments did as well. Very
| useful.
|
| Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different
| debugging approaches.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow
| random people to leave comments on your blog and be
| responsible for them?_
|
| Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues?
|
| > _Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or
| explain something technical with a comment section has: spam,
| accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of
| useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the
| author something like "please explaining how to building
| [complex thing] using circuit you post"._
|
| That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not
| true for other kinds of blogs.
|
| > _Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away._
|
| That doesn't foster a community of discussion.
|
| See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I've ran a blog that was quite popular within the torrent
| community. The comment section itself was a reason to visit
| the blog. If you have an active community or you want to
| build an active community comments are a must.
|
| Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little
| effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out
| another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which
| you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable.
|
| If your blog is just so you can write what you currently
| think about things then there is little value.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I want people's feedback and questions. I want that feedback,
| questions, and their answers, to be public. Email is private
| which means if one person asks a question my answer has to be
| repeated for each person. As comments on the blog others can
| read the the feedback and responses.
|
| As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus.
| (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to
| disqus. I will keep on using them.
| markessien wrote:
| Try remark42. Free, open source.
| camehere3saydis wrote:
| But self-host only, unless there's also a free remark42-as-a-
| Service?
| 101008 wrote:
| Is there a good alternative that it is easy to migrate to from
| Disqus? I dont want to lose all the comments that I had on my
| blog.
| beastman82 wrote:
| This guy is selling exactly that
| 101008 wrote:
| But it isn't free :-D
| foxhop wrote:
| I can help you migrate your comments into Remarkbox (founder).
|
| I used to be able to import users but they stopped exporting
| email addresses from the disqus XML.
|
| So instead I import user surrogates.
|
| Reach out directly, Remarkbox is free now!
| rendall wrote:
| I've been building a commenting system called Simple Comment that
| leverages free-tier offerings for hosting and data. So, you own
| it, hosting and data. It's at MVP status now, but it's as-yet
| pretty rough. You're welcome to try it out. I'd love feedback.
|
| https://simple-comment.netlify.app/
|
| Heck, be the first to leave a comment!
|
| It has one customer so far: my blog. https://blog.rendall.dev
| aww_dang wrote:
| There are some interesting features in Disqus's "import comments"
| feature. Most of the fun has been closed. But yeah, for vanilla
| purposes the criticism is deserved.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > 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.
| bzb6 wrote:
| A contrarian blog post lying to get its point across? Now that
| couldn't be.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| "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.
| darepublic wrote:
| roll your own commenting system
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I've done it and it can be ugly. Eventually I just disabled all
| commenting and I'm happy with that.
| dspillett wrote:
| That is the easy part.
|
| The faf is handling moderation. You won't need it at first but
| if you get any number of visitors worth counting there will be
| at least one loon amongst them uses your comment boxes to
| insult, drop in irrelevant musings for attention, hawk referrer
| links to products or links to try use you to game SEO, or to
| otherwise be an arse. And even before them you'll probably get
| the spam-bots, doing the above in an automated manner. Unless
| you actively moderate or have someone do it for you your site
| becomes something that presents that sort of rubbish to the
| rest of the Internet. If you have the time to deal with it
| fine, but do you really want that?
|
| One of the advantages of a centralised service like Disqus is
| that those services will filter a lot of that out for you. With
| a self-hosted solution you have to manage that yourself. I've
| seen some attempts at a decentralised group moderation idea but
| none I can mention that have survived long enough to gain any
| traction - none in fact that I thought were actually practical
| (if I can think of an easy way to game a system, you can bet
| anything that people who essentially game systems for living
| (or a regular hobby, just for shits & giggles) can too).
| m000 wrote:
| FWIW, pi.hole with the default blacklist of domains blocks all
| but one of the listed tracker domains. Disqus still works with
| those domains blocked.
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if anyone has considered using Gmail or another free
| email provider to be their comment backer. You get an API that
| already supports threading.
| yabones wrote:
| There was a post here a couple weeks ago about using Mastodon
| (ActivityPub) to add a comment feed to a static site. Seems
| like an interesting idea.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268
| dannyw wrote:
| Someone sends a very bad link (eg CP) and all of your google
| accounts get nuked immediately without any chance of appeal.
| foxhop wrote:
| Yup. Be vary careful with your big tech accounts. They may be
| revoked without any path to resolution.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| I have (had) a Disqus account that I connected to via my google
| account. I say had because I haven't been able to login in a year
| or so via firefox. I just get a page that says "There was an
| error submitting the form. If you're having difficulty, try
| repeating the action on https://disqus.com" with an annoying meme
| gift on the background. Luckily the title of the page says
| "Embed: CSRF verification failed (403)" but I have not been able
| to find a way to fix it. Oh well, I guess I won't be commenting
| on any site with disqus anytime soon.
|
| I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not
| based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave
| comments on any site even if the site itself did not support
| comments.
| criddell wrote:
| I also have a Disqus account and at some point it got flagged
| (incorrectly) for spam. I've emailed them and asked in their
| forums for it to be fixed but apparently it isn't something
| they will fix.
| loop22 wrote:
| > I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably
| not based on a centralized service) where one could easily
| leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not
| support comments.
|
| IIRC the Dissenter extension was just that, albeit centralized.
| vvatermelone wrote:
| There's an extension called Epiverse that does something
| similar. It used to have its own comment sections like
| Dissenter, but has since shifted to just showing discussions
| on reddit/HN that point to the webpage you're currently on.
| It's actually how I discovered HN.
| type0 wrote:
| > I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably
| not based on a centralized service) where one could easily
| leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not
| support comments.
|
| Not exactly for comments, but look at https://hypothes.is
|
| it is for collaborative note taking
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