I’ve Removed Disqus. It Was Making My Blog Worse

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370971

Partially agree, partially disagree. Blog comments were already dead when SEO fraudsters discovered that "linkbacks" could be abused for spam even easier than comments were.

Well, so they may see worse ads.

Yes, and spam is also a huge concern.

I plan to mitigate by adding "Pull Request" style moderation next.

And you can switch to a private repo

For mass moderation, just git clone, grep the lines, sed them out, and `git push -f`

Remember the use case is for static generated personal blogs.

I'd argue it's even quicker than, say a paginated bloated megabytes javascript rendered single-page application moderation system.

In case of comments you don't like, just delete the line and `git commit`

to erase the history entirely, use `git cherry-pick` and `git push -f`

It might be a nightmare for people not familiar with `git`, but for folks running a static blog like Hugo, they use lots of shell commands anyway.

They certainly do, but for they same reason why people chose static site generators like Hugo over Wordpress, I'd like complete control of full data.

The good value of static-hosted comments is that you `git clone` for backup and `git push` for redudency.

I also dislike managing DBs. Think of all those mess with backups, migrations, imports, exports, difference between mysql/pg/sqlite/d1. Tons of operating cost just for the sake of few blog comments

It's just a bunch of .jsonl files, the last resort is direct inline those .jsonl into .html files when generating

Github issue or discussion based plugins require OAuth

If you look closely, some OAuth scope requires "Act on your behalf". Others require "repo" scope which means read your private data.

Comment systems are useful/effective when someone is paying the full cost of moderation.

In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose questions and start interesting conversations that do not have an expiration date on them.

The discussion for the article can be found on the same webpage by readers, they don't have to go looking on external sites, most of which have terrible searchability and now require logins just to view content and can delete threads and valuable discussions arbitrarily.

I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.

This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted multiple times with no traction and then they suddenly blow up on 4th attempt.

This post was written in Emacs.

You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog.

That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.

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

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

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

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

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

Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!).

I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care.

FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?

The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.