[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
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Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
So, someone built Blog Surf[0] and I spent my morning weaving
through various blogs (since it has a directory), and first thing
that caught my eye was that for every 5 blogs I checked, only 1 had
comments open on article pages. If I look at posts like this
one[1] and this one also[2] - these are extremely detailed articles
(very interesting too), but no comments? I am not pointing my
finger towards the authors, either. It's just weird that
commenting is being pushed either to Twitter or email. What do you
think about this? I fully understand that blog comments can be a
pain in the butt to moderate when the average Joe just starts
leaving "Thanks!" with a link to their website. But, it's perfectly
normal to remove the ability for anyone to link back to their
website. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149 [1]:
https://wattenberger.com/blog/css-cascade [2]:
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit...
Author : skilled
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-03-30 11:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
| throw10920 wrote:
| I see a lot of comments here about post spam.
|
| There seems to be a relatively simple solution - require a proof-
| of-work puzzle to be solved before the server will accept your
| comment submission. Then put the comment into a review queue
| anyway.
|
| Valid users submit comments very infrequently compared to an
| automated bot. They won't be inconvenienced if you set the
| difficulty right, and their environmental impact and electricity
| costs will be negligible.
|
| Bots will be attempting to submit spam comments en-masse, and so
| will need to be spending a large amount of money on electricity
| for solving these problems. The expected value per problem they
| solve will be extremely low, and so they'll actually be losing
| money due to electricity costs - and as for environmental impact,
| they could have been burning that CPU to mine bitcoin or
| something _anyway_ (and, after they notice the servers they run
| their bots on start getting pegged on CPU, they 'll quickly add
| your site to a blacklist).
|
| This solution also has the benefit of not feeding Google's ML
| efforts like Recaptcha would, or requiring you to set up
| Cloudflare, or inconvenience your users.
|
| What are the downsides?
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| > Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.
|
| > What are the downsides?
|
| Unless you're a professional moderator that is paid for your
| moderation... time.
|
| The primary thing we have a finite amount of....
|
| No blogger with a blog post of substantial views is well served
| by a system that requires any moderation on their part at all.
|
| Link to a thoughtful and dedicated moderation platform and let
| that community decide if your thoughts are worthy of sharing
| and discussing.
|
| Saves everyone time.
|
| Here's a thought that just struck me, let me try it out:
|
| By not having a comment section you reduce your blogs filter
| bubble, because without knowing how people feel about your
| writing your blog post simply becomes a single entry in the
| aggregate "wisdom of crowds", once you engage a comment section
| you begin to locally meta cognate on what people think of your
| position and you end up with less original and diverse thought
| for the dedicated aggregators to surface.
| throw10920 wrote:
| That's not quite what I meant by "what are the downsides" - I
| was specifically referring to this system of proof-of-work-
| required-for-comment-submission, not comments in general.
|
| I agree that moderation requires time, my question was if
| there are downsides of adding a proof-of-work system
| specifically relative to the same system without proof-of-
| work.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I shut them off on Tedium for three reasons:
|
| 1) They were difficult to manage. You never know when someone is
| going to spam you or take a swipe at you. And if a post goes
| viral, you're basically inviting both of those things.
|
| 2) Disqus, the primary comment system I used, had advertising
| that you had to pay for to remove, and I was going in a different
| direction with my ad strategy at the time. (Also, even if I was
| OK with running ads like that, they were no longer worth the
| price of admission. There was a time back when I ran my old site,
| ShortFormBlog, where Disqus ads brought in a couple of hundred
| bucks a month. No longer.)
|
| 3) There are many other venues for people to offer their take on
| a piece; why limit them?
|
| I think Boing Boing's approach of replacing comments with a forum
| struck a good balance.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| at this point boing boing's forum is better than their blog,
| without an ad blocker it's almost impossible to read
| ge96 wrote:
| Was thinking about it regarding "do it myself or use a third
| party eg. Discus" sure it's easy to drop but then it's not your
| data anymore... Also I would think you lose SEO for an async
| loaded thing like discus. The other issue is identity/cross
| platform. And abuse.
| rapnie wrote:
| Disqus? Best first check this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033052
| ge96 wrote:
| Man I'm doing it again spelling similar sounding words, I
| still get affect/effect and then/than straight though ha.
|
| My use on disqus is a burner context, but that's a good tip
| if considering using it to host stuff for your own site.
|
| The writing on Medium comment someone made... That's tough,
| it's like shouting into the void, no response. For ex. I
| tried Vimeo to get away from YT but no watchers... Come back
| to YT, people are engaging/looking at it. Which then you
| gotta ask why are you making stuff publicly, so you want
| people to see it? If you write your own blog, gaining
| traction will be slow, probably have to spam existing sites
| with links to your site. I don't think people post ads for
| blogs.
|
| Tracking is real not denying that. I search something on
| Google and I see ads for it later (on my phone, on the
| aggregated articles feed view in Android) unless I explicitly
| use Incognito or another browser.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I never allowed them in my 25 year old site. No time to deal with
| bots, moderation and other nonsense.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| There are a couple of blogs I read that get good comments, but
| most either do not or have the comments closed. The commonality
| between the few with good comments section is that the topic of
| the blog is relatively niche and the commentors tend to have deep
| subject matter knowledge.
|
| It's worth noting one major exception to this pattern: Marginal
| Revolution (https://marginalrevolution.com/) is a very general
| blog, has a large readership, and still gets good comments on it
| (a lot of trolls too).
| notacoward wrote:
| On my own blog - started over twenty years ago - spam was always
| a problem. I'd sometimes get good exchanges involving real
| people, but not often enough to be worth wading through the spam.
|
| On the few blogs I've visited in the last few years that have
| comments, there seems to be another problem - groupthink. Such
| blogs tend to attract _very_ devoted regulars, who often converge
| on a very particular set of opinions on the blog 's topics. Sure,
| they have their internal disagreements and conflicts, just like
| the mean girls in Heathers, but that's _nothing_ compared to the
| way they 'll gang up and harass anyone who doesn't kowtow to the
| clique as a whole. Even when it's a not-quite-regular (i.e.
| repeat visitor over a long period) in generally good standing,
| disagreeing on a fairly minor point, they'll get absolutely
| _hammered_ into silence or departure. Sometimes it 's not
| deliberate or coordinated, just people who all like to have their
| own say and don't stop to consider whether the not-so-nice thing
| they're about to say has already been said by ten others. Other
| times it seems more like a peer-pressure thing, scoring points
| (or even competing) with each other by each trying to take their
| best shot at the Target Of The Day. This consolidation tends to
| compound over time, too, so the oldest blogs tend to be the worst
| afflicted.
|
| Either way, it turns the comment section into an exclusive social
| club, and precludes any substantive discussion. I can think of
| several blogs where I've seen this play out, and not one where
| real discussion has continued over the long term. So yes, maybe
| there are some exceptions somewhere, but at a first approximation
| blog comments are (and certainly should be) a thing of the past.
| neural_thing wrote:
| On Substack there are some blogs with extremely active comment
| sections.
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com
|
| https://doomberg.substack.com
|
| https://dubnationhq.com
|
| Are some examples.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at Substack.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Hosting comments on a blog has a non-zero cost. There's
| infrastructure required to support them, security concerns, and
| then content concerns. For all the potential costs there is
| vanishingly little utility in self-hosted comments.
|
| A comment section on a blog only makes sense in the world of
| spherical cows and friction-less pulleys. The vision is a blog
| post will start a conversation with readers. The reality is that
| spammers and trolls will necessitate moderation that will quickly
| eat the time a blog author might spend having conversations.
| nathell wrote:
| If the content on your blog is valuable, people will discuss it
| anyway in various places where discussion happens. They will
| discuss it on HN, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, the fediverse.
| Everywhere where it's convenient.
|
| I've come to the conclusion that adding one more discussion
| outlet won't concentrate the discussion in one place. Even when
| said outlet sits right next to the posts themselves and is
| 'canonical', that's just not going to happen. On the contrary, it
| will just contribute to the dispersion of discussion.
|
| Besides, having comments under an article means that the article
| stops being a document and starts being an application [0], and
| that's something I'd like to avoid. So, no comments on my blog.
|
| But I do plan to link to HN threads so it's easier to find
| discussion where it happens. I just don't see value in it
| happening next to the articles themselves.
|
| [0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/
| ricardobeat wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I dislike any blog that links back to HN for
| discussion.
|
| It's not a playground for everyone's blogs to use, and there is
| no guarantee an article will be posted at all - unless the
| author resorts to systematically posting his own content, which
| is another undesirable outcome.
|
| On Twitter, you might get different people posting about it,
| and accompanying thread, but no way to find them. I think
| there's still room for comment systems.
| bombcar wrote:
| And HN threads die and lock out after a time, there's no long
| term commenting.
|
| But for most people who have a blog and don't have a "trusted
| group of commenters" the value of comments is low to nil.
| pamoroso wrote:
| Social platforms did a tremendously effective job of training and
| conditioning the users to not escape their walled gardens and not
| even click links, let alone read or comment on blog posts. And
| platforms like Twitter bury tweets with links anyway, so few
| users get to see them in the first place.
| rapnie wrote:
| For Wordpress you may use an ActivityPub plugin and have your
| commenting coming from the Fediverse.
| 21723 wrote:
| Blogs themselves seem to be on the way out. I hate that this is
| the case, but it's true.
|
| The first problem is the asymmetry between downside (substantial)
| and upside (very little). We don't live in the world we had in
| 2004. Authoritarian governments and employers (which are
| basically authoritarian private governments) will find what you
| say and it will only be used against you. Text's strength and
| downfall is that it's so easy to index. Any two-bit Spreadsheet
| Eichmann looking to fire you can do a Google search on you and
| find something you said 10 years ago.
|
| Podcasts and video essays are taking over. Now, for someone to
| find something to use against you, he at least has to listen to
| content--that doesn't scale. (This may change due to widespread
| adoption of more advanced "AI" algorithms. I'm sure they're
| already being deployed by authoritarian states.) Of course, these
| have much higher barriers to entry, which means there's less
| diversity of voice and more of an emphasis on marketability...
| but there's still a lot of great content being produced (e.g.
| breadtube).
|
| Blogs were fun, but their time is over due to the increasing
| necessity of paranoia to survive. People used to write under
| their real names. That's unthinkable now, because it's so easy
| these days for employers and ill-intended governments to find
| causes to harm people.
| throw10920 wrote:
| This comment is irrelevant - nothing about "blogs" or "blog
| comments" requires (or excludes) anonymity.
| truly wrote:
| I would not say they are on the way out, but definitely out of
| the mainstream and growth is limited in this space. I would say
| the same is true of podcasts to a certain degree, with quick
| videos taking over this space.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| I haven't seen anyone link it yet, so I will. Scott Alexander
| talks about why people shut down comment sections, as part of
| explaining why the CW (read: politics) thread on his subreddit
| got shut down:
|
| > The fact is, it's very easy to moderate comment sections. It's
| very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls,
| and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog's 2000+ weekly
| comments. r/slatestarcodex's volunteer team of six moderators did
| it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week
| after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see
| how thorough a job they did.
|
| > But once you remove all those things, you're left with people
| honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that's the
| scariest thing of all.
|
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
| username223 wrote:
| I've been writing a non-tech-related Wordpress blog for 12 years,
| with comments turned on the whole time. Akismet automatically
| filters out almost all spam, and pre-approval for first-time
| commenters catches the rest. I find the comments usually
| positive, sometimes helpful, and never abusive. I can only
| conclude that some threshold of popularity, and subjects (like
| politics and maybe tech) that draw the wrong kinds of people,
| turn comments into cesspools. Since I'm not blogging for money or
| fame, or about rage-inducing topics, I'm fine.
|
| To me, blogging without comments would feel like being that guy
| at a party who drones on endlessly about his own pet obsession,
| oblivious to the fact that his "listeners" are bored or want to
| add something.
| Jefenry wrote:
| This has been exactly my experience as well. I've got a blog
| detailing how I built a small sailboat and the trips I've taken
| in it. The comments have all been either supportive or
| questions about some specific detail. I only get maybe 5
| comments a year, but it's a good feeling to know my website has
| helped someone out.
| martin_a wrote:
| Hm... What are comments like in 2022, I ask myself.
|
| There's lot of hate, spam and other abuse, one word replies or no
| replies at all.
|
| Is that worth running the "infrastructure", checking comments,
| moderating them? I don't think so, I don't miss comments in
| blogs.
| dempedempe wrote:
| eqvinox wrote:
| The problem isn't having comments on your blog, it's having
| locally scoped identities to comment on your blog. It essentially
| removes all cost for "destructive" participation, whether it be
| spam, harassment or other trolling.
|
| This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a
| larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.
| carlbordum wrote:
| Shameless plug: I built Cactus Comments (https://cactus.chat/).
|
| It's an open-source comment system federated on the Matrix
| (https://matrix.org/) network. This means you can use your
| Matrix identity to comment on any site that uses Cactus,
| without the tracking of something like disqus. Works well with
| static site generators too.
| eqvinox wrote:
| That's not particularly useful without a reputation system.
|
| In particular, any federated identity provider has a problem
| for this use case in that malicious actors can simply create
| their own domain - or multiple - and spam/troll from those.
| Blacklists essentially don't work as long as new domains can
| be created, so you end up with a whitelist, which kinda
| counteracts the federation concept.
|
| It needs something where getting blemishes on your ID is
| actually something you want to avoid. And where fresh IDs is
| not effective to bypass this.
| anothersullivan wrote:
| How about an OAuth system where you can add conditions like,
| the user has validated an address in a certain town, or worked
| for a certain company? What part of the identity would you
| scope by?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| OpenID, the _original_ OpenID was built for bloggers: your
| blog address was your login. It mostly only ever verified
| that you were also (likely) a blogger and what that address
| was. It built a unique web of commenters who were also
| bloggers. It was something of a shining golden age of blog
| commenting when OpenID was just about everywhere.
|
| OAuth and (shudder) "OpenID Connect" moved on to be nothing
| like that original OpenID and its vision. I think the death
| of the original OpenID is tied in part to the death of
| comment areas on blogs. It wasn't the only reason, but it was
| a factor in tide of them.
| anothersullivan wrote:
| That's really interesting. Finding the details of this was
| a bit hard, but I found this article (2007):
| https://blogger.googleblog.com/2007/12/openid-
| commenting.htm... Thanks for the bit of history
| rubyfan wrote:
| Yes they are a thing of the past. Whenever I run into them I
| smile for nostalgia and inevitably run into examples of why they
| are a thing of the past...
|
| 1. low utilization among real readers
|
| 2. high abuse by spammers
|
| 3. the few hold out site that keep comments on articles are
| politicized garbage of very little real value and make me wonder
| why I continue to visit their site at all, e.g. slashdot
| tomatowurst wrote:
| also forums were notorious for this, there was a program called
| xRumer or something that used to mass spam, solve captchas on
| blogs, forums to engage in short term SERP boosts and sell
| viagras.
| skilled wrote:
| I sometimes think someone has left that program running since
| _back then_ because the spam comments I have seen - they all
| look the same from 15 years ago.
| prionassembly wrote:
| I have Discord and Telegram groups for my blogs. I think most
| people that reach it bounce after seeing how loooong and hard to
| parse (at first glance) my posts are, but there's three or five
| people who AFAIK are reading me.
|
| Ima just go ahead and spam it: https://asemic-horizon.com -- I
| don't think it's for the median HN dude/tte, but this forum is a
| meeting of diverse minds...
| kkfx wrote:
| Comments are a thing of the past... People miss a place to "talk"
| like classical usenet so use and abuse any kind of "comment" and
| "social" tool for that, on the other side of the spectrum
| comments serve surveillance capitalism needs for profiling and
| insights.
|
| If you want "comments" back you need to be back on usenet and
| when, perhaps out of a discussion, you decide to made an article
| instead of a post you just do it on your website (more than
| "blog", witch are effectively a thing of the past for other
| reasons) and post the relevant link a a new thread in a relevant
| ng. Comments happen there, a proper tool for the relative job :-)
| CPLX wrote:
| There's some left. The community at https://gothamist.com is a
| good example.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Commenting hasn't just been pushed to twitter or ...email(?) --
| it's been pushed here!
|
| Yes, due to insane spam and bots and difficulty of
| managing/moderating, but I appreciate companies and bloggers
| close to this site/who are fans or at least frequent, including a
| thread link to their bigger posts here. CloudFlare sticks out
| gregdoesit wrote:
| I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog
| dedicated for software engineering topics.
|
| I removed all commenting options after about 8 years of blogging.
| The reason was spam, noise and little value add.
|
| Around 2015 70% of comments coming in to my blog were from bots
| and another 10% from anonymous folks making irrelevant, and
| sometimes insulting comments which I all had to delete. About 20%
| of the comments were still valuable, but moderating felt like an
| additional stress, on top of writing.
|
| After a few of my blog posts made it on to Hacker News, I noticed
| the discussions here are far more interesting and productive,
| surpassing the best comment threads on my blog over the 8 years
| while I still had comments open.
|
| I removed all commenting and never looked back. When I write, I
| focus on writing. If anyone wants to, they can find my contact
| details to share insights about the post - and some people still
| do.
|
| As someone writing a blog, I'm much better off with no comments
| open to the whole world. I suspect this is what most other people
| have also realized.
| wawj wrote:
| tjansen wrote:
| Maybe that's an idea for a product: find discussions on HN,
| Twitter, Reddit, FB etc about your blog post and embed them on
| the blog where you would usually see the comments. Not sure how
| big the market is, but...
| TuringTest wrote:
| _> Not sure how big the market is, but..._
|
| Probably, good enough for a Wordpress plugin.
| warrenm wrote:
| There are ways to automatically grab feeds of specific
| hashtags on Twitter
|
| Maybe post your blog with something "unique[ish]"?
| jboynyc wrote:
| Or turn tweets into webmentions using https://brid.gy/
| lamontcg wrote:
| Comment sibling of yours by turoczy suggests that already
| exists?
|
| > I tried a few of those "commenting" solutions that
| attempted to pull the social channels into the blog itself,
| but they never seemed to recreate that 2005-2010 dynamic of
| active and engaging conversations occurring on a single post.
| superlopuh wrote:
| I've thought about this, and would love a browser extension
| that would let me see all the past discussions when I visit a
| website that has previously been submitted to HN. Maybe one
| day I'll make it.
| lhnz wrote:
| Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-
| hacker-news-s...
|
| Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n...
| jboynyc wrote:
| I believe Lobste.rs is a good citizen and sends a webmention.
| Other services could follow suit. There'd be no need for an
| additional product then.
| turoczy wrote:
| I've been blogging in some form or another since the late 90s,
| but consistently on the same blog for going on 15 years.
|
| Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My
| motivation had less to do with spam. (I'm on WordPress and it
| does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the
| conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks
| wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than
| centralizing that conversation on individual blogs.
|
| (As an aside, I rarely participated in those comment threads on
| my blog. I always saw them as a place for others to talk about
| a post. I'd already had my chance to say my piece. So the
| comments had less value to me, personally, but seemed to have
| value to the folks reading my blog. All to say that I wasn't
| really driving engagement with the comments. I was just letting
| them do what they were doing.)
|
| I tried a few of those "commenting" solutions that attempted to
| pull the social channels into the blog itself, but they never
| seemed to recreate that 2005-2010 dynamic of active and
| engaging conversations occurring on a single post.
|
| It's also worth noting that, in my experience, a big motivator
| for many platforms had to do with driving pageviews. And once
| commenting stopped doing that, folks seemed to lose interest in
| continuing to offer that functionality.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| I have been blogging for twenty years, unfortunately, not on
| same blog though. But I was also using WordPress and comment
| spam was virtually nil.
|
| For me the big issues was lack of comments. It made my blogs
| look like no one was reading them. So I turned off comments.
|
| Then I realized all other functionality of WordPress was
| geared towards businesses or marketers. I don't need every
| blog post to automatically spam all of my social networks. It
| was just extra work to keep WordPress secure and updated.
|
| So I moved to static site generator, and if I want to share
| certain posts, I will manually share with friends. Much
| better engagement and comments this way.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| My blog dates back in some fashion or another to some point
| in the 1990s and before the word "blog". It's been through
| so many different technologies. The only "off-the-shelf"
| one used Drupal for a few years. Most of the rest were
| bespoke. Many versions and archives have since been lost
| though I've tried to keep continuity where I can (the
| current blog has some URL redirects all the way back from
| the second version on Drupal after the last major loss of
| archives).
|
| When going bespoke again after Drupal I decided to
| outsource comments (to Disqus) knowing full well from
| previous versions the spam problems and the tools to fight
| it. That was for a Python/Django blog engine I wrote and
| used for a few years. I've since moved to an SSG (Jekyll
| for ease of Github-automated build process; maybe I'll
| revisit now that Github Actions exist).
|
| A few years back I decided to eliminate all trackers and
| deeply audit third party JS code on my blog. Disqus of
| course did not pass the bar I set for myself (and my
| current feelings about privacy and ad tracking) and I
| thought I'd replace it with something bespoke maybe, put up
| a "temporary" warning that comments are currently gone, but
| I just haven't and I haven't really felt much pressure to.
| At this point I'm not sure if I should. I miss comments
| some, but the heyday for comments on my blog was during
| college (in "the Google Reader era") and was never quite
| the same since.
|
| I still have the dump of Disqus comments and there are at
| least a few historic discussions in there (some of which
| themselves were migrated out of Drupal back in the day) I
| keep thinking of trying to repost them somehow on the
| relevant posts, but keep procrastinating that idea as well,
| in part because I don't know if/how I will turn comments
| back on in general. I'm not sure if I even need to at this
| point. I keep wondering if I miss comments only for
| nostalgia's sake and that era is now so far in the past
| anyway that there isn't much to gain in the current era
| with comments on blog posts.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I can confirm this with what I've experienced. I've blogged
| since around 2003(ish?) and around 5 years ago I decided that
| it's just not worth the hazzle.
|
| If your goal is to provide a safe discussion space, it's way
| too much maintenance work for a non-financially-driven and no-
| clickbait blog.
|
| The bad people of 4chan were always commenting from time to
| time in waves, but last year kind of made me realize that I
| probably will never feature comments ever again on any website
| I'm building.
|
| Your life as a blog author is just way better living in
| blissful ignorance than reading so much hate before you delete
| it anyways :) 4chan and other imageboards infiltrate your
| thoughts through hate, and I just don't have time for that and
| don't want to waste my time thinking about trolls.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I have a blog which has been running for a long time, and I allow
| comments on the most recent post, for about ten days, then close
| them off.
|
| That cuts down on the automated spammers, and allows people who
| are actively following me (not so many people I expect) to offer
| feedback.
|
| In the past I'd get five-ten comments on a post, these days maybe
| 1 at the most. It seems like few people comment, either that
| means nobody reads, or people have no complaints/updates to
| offer. It is a bit hard to tell.
|
| I tend to post about debian, golang, parsers, and similar random
| things https://blog.steve.fi/
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| most of the substacks I subscribe to have excellent comment
| sections.
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| Not to "self promote" but I recently shared an article[0]
| detailing how I personally manage comments on my blog.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30206330
| rchaud wrote:
| Nobody wants to see a "Be the first to comment" message at the
| end of a post.
| m_eiman wrote:
| In my opinion there's an interesting middle ground, where you
| don't have comments but allow (moderated) linkbacks (I forget the
| name of the modern variant of this...) from other blog posts
| mentioning yours.
| skilled wrote:
| I think you're talking about Webmentions.[0]
|
| [0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
| ferruck wrote:
| I think Webmentions could be _the_ solution to the problem:
| They allow anyone to comment on and add to your writings
| without requiring to open an account on each and every blog
| and they endorse elaborate, "readworthy" responses.
|
| Alas, they're used seldom.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Unfortunately, Webmentions are also still a spam vector
| that needs moderation.
|
| I don't think Webmentions yet are common enough to get much
| spam, but some of us still remember spam wars in
| Webmentions predecessors like Pingback.
| aproductguy wrote:
| I run a pretty large NBA blog, that gets crazy traffic. We
| decided to spend energy and time moderating comments. Basically
| we go by "don't be an asshole", and while it's onerous, the
| community that has sprung up around it is incredible. We have
| people who've been commenting since 2007, and it was worth it if
| you have the time to spare. My $0.02
| mobilemidget wrote:
| I read blogs, usually blog posts about a specific remedy for a
| tech issue. The only reason for me to read/skim comments is if
| the suggested remedy or solution is no longer working and if
| somebody in the comments might have added their findings that do
| work. Else I have no reason to read any of the comments.
| sm_ts wrote:
| The following is my personal experience (so I can't comment on
| the general nature of blog comments).
|
| I have a "strictly technical" SWE blog with approximately 4k to
| 8k users per month, which I have been maintaining it for 3/4
| years.
|
| I use Disqus for comments. I virtually have no spam (if I had
| some, it's been so little that I don't remember it). The comments
| are generally good quality (some even improved the articles),
| possibly due to the nature of the blog, but they're few.
|
| If spamming and low quality comments are due to open comment
| systems, I'd still stick with a closed system like Disqus, as I
| prefer fewer but more motivated comments.
|
| On a funny note, it took me a while to find out that Disqus
| introduced taboola ads at some point, because I use ad blockers.
| The moment I found out, I was so horrified that I thought
| somebody hacked the blog and panicked; it took me a bit to figure
| out what actually happened :)
| pranit10 wrote:
| If you don't mind sharing, how did you obtain that many users
| in such a short period?
| sm_ts wrote:
| Sure! I've actually though that it was a relatively small
| number :) I've reached 8k users around 1/1.5 years ago, so
| the times are even shorter.
|
| I did not plan for exposure (audience size); however, looking
| at the stats, I think that there is a clear indication.
|
| My articles are often more or less deep dives into mainstream
| topics; I believe that the consequences of this approach are
| two:
|
| 1. the articles get exposure because the topics are common,
| and frequently searched by developers;
|
| 2. by being deep dives, I think they slowsly get used as
| references and linked by other sites.
|
| I think this is a specific approach with pros and cons.
|
| The pros are that it slowly grows a good audience over the
| time, and that it tends to have a stable minimum (since the
| references are there). Also, repeated deep dives in a given
| field will get attention from known people working in it,
| which is very significant.
|
| The downside is that this type of articles is a pain to write
| (and I'm not sure I'll continue).
|
| I had at least one article that exploded in popularity,
| however, while that's nice to see, it's a type of article
| that doesn't provide any value in the long term (on the other
| hand, short term is also important; I got interviewed because
| of it).
|
| I think the numbers are generally normal to reach if one
| focuses on at least one subject, and dives in it. My blog is
| intentionally very scattered - if I focused, say, on
| databases, I would have certainly multiplied the users, but
| that's not my end goal.
|
| All the best! :) The blog is
| https://saveriomiroddi.github.io, by the way :)
| jimhefferon wrote:
| I see a lot of people saying why not to have comments, and they
| are all fair things to say. But in counterpoint I'll say that
| sometimes I send a technical correction, or other such friendly
| remark, that I think the blogger gains by.
|
| But of course I agree that the great majority of comments that
| you see are very discouraging.
| TomGullen wrote:
| Our company blog https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-
| official-blog-1 regularly gets good amounts of comments from our
| community, the way we implement it we see it as a key opportunity
| for our customers to open dialogue with us and get their
| feedback. We have no plans to disable comments, benefits far
| outweigh the positives.
|
| It's also a nice moral boost for the team on occasion!
| https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1...
|
| We have pretty easy tools to remove spam accounts and spam
| comments, it's rarely an issue. I feel like because it's a custom
| implementation we're off a lot of radars, and we make the process
| of registering to being able to post comments laborious enough to
| stop most of it (honeypots, verified emails, etc)
| pdrojack wrote:
| Can you please tell me what tools you use to remove spam
| accounts and spam comments ?
| sails wrote:
| I really like https://utteranc.es/ for blogs, it requires a
| github account which seems a high enough bar, and has led to some
| very sparse but useful feedback.
|
| edit - only option I tried, but there are alternatives linked in
| the comments here
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion
| boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment
| fields for C&C for botnets.
|
| Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and
| interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting
| discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and
| invite a lot of shitty behavior.
|
| If you have something substantive to say, respond in a blog post
| of your own.
|
| If you have something personal to say, send an email. This is
| scary and intimate, but also permits you to actually talk to a
| person without the performative aspect of doing it in public.
| rasen58 wrote:
| Why doesn't HN have botspam then?
| jonas21 wrote:
| HN has @dang!
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| HN have a different approach. Here in HN, new accounts are
| restricted to comments only, the restriction will slowly
| remove as the account get older and have amble "karma"
| (sorry, I am not sure what term for here in HN) then they
| will gain the ability to vote later on.
|
| Also HN prevents people from voting on parent comments if
| they respond to it. So if they commented it, then it is
| considered as voted. If they up/downvote the comment and then
| posted a response to that, HN automatically replace the vote
| to comment response.
|
| I like this approach because it is a great way to have
| engaging discussion than trying to drive meaningless and
| irrelevant comments as top comments.
| muzani wrote:
| Traffic + downvotes. A blog may have downvotes but not the
| human traffic to utilize them
| Zak wrote:
| Beyond downvotes. there's flagging. It doesn't take many
| flags from higher-karma accounts to kill a comment from a
| new account, nor does it take many killed comments to
| shadowban a new account.
|
| To protect against false positives, accounts with enough
| karma can vouch for dead comments to bring them back to
| life.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Larger forums like HN and Reddit have the economies of scale
| on their side. They have a lot more time and money to throw
| on solving the problem than a blogger or someone who runs a
| phpBB-forum as a hobby.
| [deleted]
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| > They have a lot more time and money to throw on solving
| the problem
|
| No, they get others to do it
| Zak wrote:
| > _Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion
| boards._
|
| The discussion boards I'm on that are still active do not have
| a spam problem. The usual methods of limiting new accounts and
| giving established accounts a bit of moderation power (e.g.
| several accounts flagging a post as spam hides it from other
| users) seems to be sufficient as long as the traffic is there.
|
| I think the bigger problem in most cases is that people have
| left for more centralized platforms because the barrier to
| entry is lower, or some parts of the user experience are
| better. One part of the UX that centralized platforms do better
| is allowing users to get updates on more conversations in one
| place. Polling a large number of sites gets annoying, and email
| is not a great notification system (web push notifications are
| improving this).
|
| More federated systems could help here, though I haven't been
| especially impressed with Matrix or ActivityPub-based social
| networking so far.
| rosndo wrote:
| > Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields
| for C&C for botnets
|
| Any examples of this that aren't just PoCs?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's very hard to actually demonstrate without a doubt, but a
| lot of the blog spam you see basically has a very clear
| numbers station vibe. No links, just fairly obviously machine
| generated word salad.
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| I can absolutely confirm that as a thing, but I can't
| confirm my employment history.
| rosndo wrote:
| It should be as easy as linking a malware sample, no?
|
| I think the spam you're referring to is usually targeting
| the "Website" field of Wordpress comments, which turns the
| username of the commenter into a hyperlink.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| How do you use comment fields for a botnet?
| trollied wrote:
| Hosts can check a specific URL for instructions, which can be
| in the form of a blog comment
| meerita wrote:
| I had one the most popular blogs in the hispanic sphere. I had to
| shutdown comments due, most of the blog posts had 0
| participation, and I discovered discussion moved to other
| platforms, more suitable for discussion and free from the
| censorship of every blog author.
|
| I also shutdown comments due lack of value, spam.
| taubek wrote:
| Spam is killing the blog comments.
| mongol wrote:
| Perhaps a solution could be to make a Ttweet in association with
| the blog post, so comments can be made there?
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| handling bots is just not worth it. if there is a discussion
| happening on hackernews i usually add a link to the article. i
| also like the way lowtechmagazine handles comments but some could
| also argue that it builds an echo chamber if you are handling the
| moderation of your own content but that would also be happening
| on a normal blog.
| donatj wrote:
| Blogging without comments is weird to me. I have a small handful
| of blogs, one of which just turned 21 years old, and the reason I
| blog is the comments. I want to hear what others have to say. I
| want to know when I am wrong. I am not an unquestionable pillar
| of truth, I am a dude that finds things interesting and wants to
| talk about it. I want to learn more, and the collective peanut
| gallery inevitably knows more than I do.
|
| My whole reason for doing it is a two way interaction. I think
| not enough people can just talk these days though, they get angry
| and mean about the silliest stuff. That leads to thinner skinned
| people just not willing to actually listen to anyone else, which
| is a shame. The most hate I ever got was a post about Go binary
| sizes of all things - literal personal attacks. Like I just
| wanted to have a conversation about compilers and people were
| insulting my mental abilities.
|
| So basically on the one hand can understand why people would not
| have comments, but on the other hand I have no idea why you would
| blog at all without them aside from ego.
| klibertp wrote:
| > and the reason I blog is the comments. [...] I have no idea
| why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.
|
| I would have not written any blog post in a decade if that
| (EDIT: comments instead of ego) was my motivation. My blog
| features a grand total of 5 comments in 12 years. Writing my
| posts takes a lot of time and effort - they are very (by
| today's standards) technical, and very long, and no matter
| where I try posting them to get any kind of attention, I just
| don't get it. I decided not to care - I now write posts for a
| reason similar to what motivates people to sail through
| Atlantic alone or run a marathon. It just feels really good to
| get to the finishing line. But it's also a fact that I would
| have been writing way more often if I knew the posts will be
| read and discussed; I'm just finding my ways to emotionally
| cope with the knowledge that they won't.
|
| Yeah, I'm just grumbling, so don't mind me. Still, I'm jealous.
| Being able to use comments as a reason for writing would be
| great. So, be happy that you can do this!
| notacoward wrote:
| Books don't have comment sections either. Neither do plays. Do
| you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play does so
| only because of ego? Some do, surely, but many just have
| information or insight or entertainment they want to make
| available to others. In some subset of those cases, the
| incremental value of adding comments is nil (or worse). Maybe
| it's those who _do_ crave comments who are blogging out of
| nothing but ego ... or maybe such dismissiveness is just
| generally ill considered.
| axus wrote:
| The author for "Scary Go Round" comics (which are turned into
| books) has great conversations with his commenters:
|
| https://badmachinery.com/comic/those-longjohns/#comments
| donatj wrote:
| > Do you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play
| does so only because of ego
|
| Yes. Especially in this day and age when there are other
| options, like _a Blog_ , with a comment section.
|
| You write a book because you want something to put on your
| resume.
|
| A notable exception here would be Andy Weir's "The Martian",
| which started as a blog, with a comment section, where he
| received many corrections as he developed it.
| cypher_31 wrote:
| Just as a counter point, I wrote a book because I wanted to
| prove to myself that I could. It will probably never see
| the light of day, but I did it and I found the experience
| valuable. But, maybe you are just talking about people who
| sell books? In that case, I think the majority of authors
| are not getting rich, famous, or hired for the number of
| books on their resume.
| donatj wrote:
| > I wanted to prove to myself that I could
|
| I'm pretty sure the need to prove yourself _to yourself_
| is the truest literary form of freudian ego.
| notacoward wrote:
| _Only_? You can 't imagine a selfless motivation? Someone
| wanting to share or help others without requiring
| recompense and/or feedback? Just want to be clear here.
| donatj wrote:
| The thought that anyone would _want_ to read what you
| have to say alone is ego.
|
| > share or help others without requiring recompense
|
| Most authors of book seek actual monetary compensation
| notacoward wrote:
| > The thought that anyone would want to read what you
| have to say alone is ego.
|
| I hope that was a generic "you" and not intended as an
| insult. In any case, it's untrue except for a definition
| of "ego" so expansive as to be meaningless. Is it ego to
| believe that some subset of people you already know and
| have some affinity with _might_ derive some benefit or
| enjoyment from something you write? For many bloggers the
| mere _possibility_ of that is sufficient to put the
| writing in a public place instead of a private diary, but
| they 'd also be quite content if that didn't happen.
|
| I'm trying hard not to be as derogatory as you are with
| your implication that others are thin-skinned or
| egotistical, but I suspect that this goalpost-moving on
| "ego" reflects _your own_ motivations more than any
| general reality. So does the "weirdness" you mention.
| Perhaps you should consider that other people are
| motivated differently than you are _and that 's OK_.
| There's nothing weird or egotistical at all about wanting
| to communicate with others in a non-transactional way,
| for its own sake.
| supz_k wrote:
| Disclose: I'm a founder of a commenting system
|
| I have worked with bloggers and news sites over the last 2 years,
| and are some things I have learned:
|
| * Comments give a better sense of the your audience. Take Youtube
| for example. When you see comments in a video, you know what kind
| of audience that channel has, and what the audience like. Same
| for blogs. * Comments give new visitors an idea how good/bad your
| blog post is. For example, take a programming tutorial. When
| there are comments about the article, you can make a better
| decision whether you should use the code examples in your
| application. Don't forget that stackoverflow is built on user
| comments. People are not going to search the article you shared
| on Twitter to find out comments. (If you only share on
| Twitter/HN, make sure to link the Twitter/HN discussion at the
| bottom, like Cloudflare blog does) * Comments let you build your
| own audience, which you own. Just think, what happens when
| Twitter bans you?
|
| However,
|
| * When new bloggers do not get comments from their audience, they
| become discouraged. I have seen people really excited about
| starting their new blog and adding our commenting system, and
| they just say after a few weeks, they just remove comments from
| their blog because they don't get comments. The fact is that
| getting comments on your blog is harder than getting a comment on
| social media. The obvious reason is that the user has to
| "signup".
|
| Okay, so what if make commenting easier? For example, just with
| username. So, we make commenting public. It works fine until you
| are flooded with spam comments. Tools like Akismet do a good job
| on detecting spam. The real problem comes when people start to
| publish non-spam but not-so-good comments on your blog. This is
| when you need moderating... manual moderating. It requires time.
|
| Finally, to answer your question: Are blog comments a thing of
| the past? It is a decision of the blogger. Some like to have
| public discussions, but some like to have it in Twitter DMs or
| emails. Some don't care about moderating but some do. From my
| experience, most news sites I worked with REALLY care about their
| commenting section, and they invest a lot in software and
| moderation teams to have nice, engaging conversations on their
| websites.
| scscsc wrote:
| The internet has become larger.
|
| People's attention is more dispersed (additionally, several
| platforms are actively fighting for their attention by using all
| tricks in the book).
|
| Hence the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped. The people who would
| leave thoughtful comments are busy with other things.
|
| A few communities still stand (hacker news included).
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| We've had several clients ask us to disable their blog comments
| in the last 3 or so years and the reason was always moderation.
| Even when the comments generate good conversation or produce
| something of value SEO or community wise, it's not worth the
| effort to weed out the bad comments and conversation you don't
| want happening on the blog.
|
| For our clients, it was almost always turning into a political
| discussion. Even on posts talking about something as innocuous as
| an event that was held for the company's employees, people would
| turn up and start talking about something political and it would
| eventually devolve into threats and dox attempts. It just wasn't
| worth the moderation effort anymore.
|
| Spam can be blocked automatically by tools fairly easy but actual
| conversations unrelated to the topic at hand required too much
| work. And in one case, threats led to police involvement and that
| was more than the client was willing to deal with.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I keep comments on mine enabled, but the comment system is one i
| made myself and it is not enough trouble for spammers to bother
| to custom-spam it :)
| Folcon wrote:
| Maybe I'm in the minority here based on the comments I can see so
| far, but I really do value good comments on a blog when they come
| up.
|
| I do sympathise with writers who don't want to deal with
| moderating it, working out how to manage them is a problem, but
| finding the one of dozens of spaces people are talking about the
| thing written is also challenging.
|
| I mean, my own blog doesn't have comments.
|
| Twitter et al don't really solve this I find because you really
| can't find the different threads of discussion that are occurring
| after the fact. It's really not helpful when you're trying to
| understand what was being said at the time on those kinds of
| platforms. I don't want to have to be an archaeologist to work
| out what was being said at the time about a topic.
|
| One recent trend which I do like is authors explicitly calling
| out spaces to respond to their work, via a link. I see this a lot
| with HN and reddit threads being called out by the author and
| it's really nice reading the follow on thoughts of people who've
| engaged with the writing, perhaps years later from when the
| initial article was written.
|
| But I do think we need a better solution to this.
| vladstudio wrote:
| I'd say it depends on content. I have comments on my wallpaper
| pages [0] and they are very useful and inspiring for me.
|
| P.S. It is ironic that this very page is full of valuable
| comments :-)
|
| [0]: https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/blue_and_yellow
| tjoff wrote:
| Ad a user, I love comments. and the few I stumble upon are very
| often very helpful or insightful.
|
| Either correcting something in the blog, or an update due to new
| software releases or alternatives that might work in other
| contexts. Etc.
|
| Extremely helpful and very much appreciated.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I have yet to implement this but I think a really good idea for
| blog comments is to link your blog post to a fediverse post. It
| has been posted here on HN several times already so you can
| google it but people have done this already.
|
| That way you get the moderation of the fediverse, an account on
| some AP instance is required, but you can still display the
| comments on your website with embedded JS.
| 3np wrote:
| Also if you think this sounds neat and don't have a blog setup
| of choice already, writefreely is both easy to self-host and
| has public and free instances: https://writefreely.org/
| warrenm wrote:
| I used to like blog comments
|
| But I now [mostly] hate them
|
| And not just for the spam aspect (though it's a factor)
|
| It's that comments are going to happen where they happen
|
| And some platforms (reddit, hn, twitter, etc) are, quite frankly,
| _better_ places than trying to selfishly centralize it all to my
| blog
|
| The audience reach _elsewhere_ is millions of times more than on
| my blog
| [deleted]
| liotier wrote:
| Running any public forum mostly means moderation. Trawling
| through hundreds of spam comments that got through the filters,
| to find the occasional jewel, ceased to motivate me.
|
| Should we be sad that discussion about a piece doesn't occur
| centrally, or is it actually better that several discussions
| occur - each of them with their hosting venue's specific tone ?
| As someone else mentioned, webmentions might bring the best of
| both worlds.
| account42 wrote:
| Do you know if webmentions do anything against spam or if they
| just defer that problem until the technology gets popular
| enough for spammers to catch on?
| liotier wrote:
| I have not found webmentions-specific antispam processes. I
| suppose that, a whitelist/greylist/blacklist approach at host
| level might keep it manageable: if a social host can't
| moderate its spammers, then it is not worth accepting traffic
| from.
| jamesvandyne wrote:
| Yes, it's called Vouch and it's documented well on the
| indieweb wiki. https://indieweb.org/Vouch
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I do not even consider commenting on random blogs. It feels that
| got completely taken over by bots and shills and angry angry
| people a long time ago.
|
| Upon further reflection, it's also about sense of community, or
| lack thereof - on social networks, I know who's reading my
| comments and I can engage with them. On blogs... I have no idea
| who else is reading it, I may never come back to see any
| responses, I may not care about anybody else's comments without
| context to put them in, so neither the incentive nor feedback
| loop are there for me.
|
| (I may comment on e.g. Rock Paper Shotgun, but I don't consider
| it a blog - it's an online magazine and it has both the sense of
| community and daily return value. )
| account42 wrote:
| Part of it might be due to the rise of static site generators
| which almost by definition do not directly support comments
| without having an additional non-static service, external or not.
|
| Even just having an endpoint to submit comments seems a lot to
| ask when the site otherwise doesn't even need a database.
|
| Ultimately I think the need/want for discussion is better served
| by different websites rather than asking every site to provide
| comments. It would be nice if browsers could integrate or at
| least link those comments for you.
| brycewray wrote:
| There are a number of commenting solutions that work with SSGs.
| Two in particular which may appeal to the HN crowd are
| Utterances[0] and the more recent giscus[1], each of which uses
| GitHub services (GitHub Issues and GitHub Discussions,
| respectively). Assuming your commenters don't have a problem
| with having to log into GitHub to say something, either of
| these will work. I've also written in the past[2] about some
| other SSG-friendly possibilities.
|
| [0]: https://utteranc.es/
|
| [1]: https://giscus.app/
|
| [2]: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2020/10/conversation-
| piece/
| dcz_self wrote:
| That was the case for me: I built a static site generator in
| 500 lines of Python.
|
| Adding comments took me a long time and lots of effort in
| comparison - I described that on the blog too:
| https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/potion/
|
| It's been up for almost a month and I already engaged one
| person. That's less than discussions on Mastodon, but it serves
| as an obvious meeting point for readers, so I guess it's not
| entirely a wasted effort.
| mdoms wrote:
| One of my most memorable and proud moments was when I was a
| junior developer. I wrote a blog about ScriptCS and how it worked
| (in the very early days when documentation was sparse so it took
| significant research). One of the (very few) comments on my blog
| was Glenn Block - a man I considered a borderline legend in my
| .NET field - commenting very positively and thanking me for my
| effort. It seems so minor and silly now but it was an incredibly
| energising experience.
|
| I guess people are getting the same kinds of feedback through
| Twitter now but it feels so much more... I dunno, inauthentic?
| pSYoniK wrote:
| I think the idea of the participatory web came at a time when
| people who were participating in the web were a lot kinder and a
| lot more curios and open about the web in general. I remember
| being able to scroll through a few forums on which I spent time
| and being able to engage in conversations with complete strangers
| with relative ease (late 90s early 00s). At this point, even a
| somewhat harmless comment on here can result in abuse very
| quickly or in a swift escalation towards uncivilized behavior.
| It's still vastly better to a lot of the other arenas of
| discussion though.
|
| Which says firstly something about the quality of the discourse
| that can occur within the comments section and the tone of these
| comments.
|
| Comments have also devolved into a collection of memes and one-
| liners that don't add anything to the discussion in the best case
| scenario. At worst, they lead to my previous point. As gregdoesit
| said in the top comment, a lot of comments have evolved into
| straight up spam and, similarly, on my blog, I added my contact
| email address if someone wants to follow up or inquire about
| anything I post there.
|
| So I think that the participatory internet is dead to some
| extent. I never got this "comment on a news article" thing
| either. If a bomb goes off and tragically kills 5 people your
| "thoughts and prayers + praying-emoji" doesn't add anything.
| Commenting "fake news" also doesn't add anything. A team losing a
| game 2-0 or 38-0 also doesn't need a comment section "no, they
| didn't!".
|
| What I think I'm trying to say is that there is little to be
| gained, it ads additional maintenance overhead and it can also
| become toxic very quickly. An older page I had use to provide
| comments but most of my time was deleting the 10-15 comments
| posted every day by bots.
|
| Also, the irony of me posting a comment about being anti-comment
| isn't lost on me.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yup the general populace have entered the web.
| dwheeler wrote:
| For me, it's a time issue. I don't have time to moderate blog
| comments on my own blog, so I disabled comments.
|
| Some people might post some really awesome comments, but a small
| percentage of people ruin the whole thing. So moderation is a
| necessity if you're going to allow comments. HN obviously allows
| comments, but it's because HN has dedicated moderators (thank
| you!).
|
| Most people are not trolls. But there are enough trolls who pee
| in the pool that many pools have had to be closed.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| My blog has comments and I have noticed the rate of comments per
| page view actually increasing over the last few years.
|
| I have spam blockers though.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Small blog here [1]. Had very positive experiences with comments
| powered by GitHub Discussions (giscus [2]). No Spam so far and
| the comments were on-topic.
|
| [1]: https://du.nkel.dev/ [2]: https://giscus.app/
| jrnichols wrote:
| They were a thing of the past shortly after they started. I
| remember back in my blogging days with Movable Type and I wrote
| an entry that angered A LOT of fans of a popular radio show host.
| It was impossible for me to keep up with the offensive and
| hateful comments they were leaving on literally every single
| post, so I ended up disabling the entire thing.
|
| It didn't get much better with Blogger either. Now much of the
| time I see Facebook Comments embedded, or something like Disqus.
| Comment horror stories didn't help Digg much, if I recall
| correctly.
|
| bots, spam, and uncontrollable political nonsense took most of
| them out. I don't think it's too weird. It takes a lot of the
| stress off of the blog owners, and to some extent, the
| responsibility.
|
| Blogs weren't alone either.
|
| https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-happened-after-7-news...
| Theodores wrote:
| It depends on what you are doing. Imagine a blog about model
| steam trains, say 3.5" guage. It is not general interest.
|
| Or local archaeology. Again, not general interest.
|
| Or an artist and his/her work. Again not general interest.
|
| But in all these scenarios there is benefit in it not being yet
| another Facebook group and having comments open for that specific
| community.
|
| For spam there is good old recapthca and then the check to see if
| it is Eric Jones.
|
| Some people are not popular and don't get a torrent of comments
| to filter.
|
| It all depends on what you are doing.
|
| With software you can't expect useful comments. Stack Overflow
| have got people covered. But with something like model steam
| engines where there is geographical scope and a particular
| demographic, comments make sense.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I just started writing a blog and I went through this thought
| process then. The reason I don't have comments on the blog is
| that I don't want to spend time moderating, and I usually access
| blogs from a forum like HN or reddit, where there is already a
| discussion. I know there is some fraction of the community that
| searches for blogs directly, but the main engagement I get is
| from reddit, so most of the audience doesn't need a comments
| section.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| I run a tech/business blog (thetechee.com) and the amount of spam
| I get is nauseating. I thought it'll reduce when I switched from
| Blogger to WordPress, but it became much worse.
|
| A recent shocker was someone (or a spambot) posting links to
| supposed child porn on my site. Don't worry, I didn't bother to
| click it...
|
| I haven't yet shut down my comment section, but I set it such
| that I must approve all new comments. Needless to say, I have a
| backlog of 600+ comments to approve, and 99% of them are spam so
| I just don't bother
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| In addition to a forum, I think blogs should have a built-in
| video chat, so that people can have real-time conversations about
| the posts.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Blog comments are great when you have a high readership, and lot
| of quality comments.
|
| Otherwise, you just have a lot of ongoing maintenance. Older
| posts look really old with a few early comments, and then gaps.
| If you want to rewrite part of a post, you're sort of stuck with
| those parts referenced by comments.
|
| If it's so tricky, and your blog is a hobby/side project, it's
| just logical to have blogs on the site you control, and
| discussion in the wild where network effects can boost it. Then
| leave open channels for people to contact you personally, if you
| want further engagement.
|
| The medium seems to have settled into these features for your
| average blogger.
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