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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.
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.
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.
What parts of the web are that, if I may ask?
I think Discourse is popular in software and tech related organizations — I see it a lot on such websites.
(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 )
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.
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.
There's also Isso[1] and utterances[2] (Github issues based)
[1] - https://posativ.org/isso/ [2] - https://github.com/utterance/utterances
I never understood Commento's SSO system. We went with HMAC instead.
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.
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.
I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.
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-...
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.
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.
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".
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different debugging approaches.
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).
Yeah, their data breach exposing mine and 18 million other's accounts made it the last time I used them.
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.
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
> 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.
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!
If someone wants to comment on your blog, they can write their own blog post on their blog and send a webmention. That can get linked at the bottom of your blog post with a text snippet summary.
There's no "API" beyond "curl -i -d source=URL -d target=URL WEBMENTION_ENDPOINT" in the traditional sense. Using microformats markup for better exraction is optional.
The result is a federated system of comments owned and controlled by nobody except the original author. No need to use someone's Matrix server or spin up your own. It also imposes a bit of a barrier to entry (must have your own (micro)blog), but if you don't want any random person to leave a comment that can be a feature.
Services like brid.gy turn Fediverse and Twitter comments into Webmentions as well; I've thought about using it for Fediverse comments in the past, but I don't want to host a new program or rely on a third-party service.
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.
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.
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
IIRC the Dissenter extension was just that, albeit centralized.
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.
... 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.
"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.
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!
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!
FWIW, Facebook was doing the exact same thing. I think they still do, though I don't see it as much.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
- 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.
I wrote a blog post about integrating it into Next.js: https://richardwillis.info/blog/self-hosted-staticman-dokku-...
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.
- 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.
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
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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
My only complaint with Commento was that automated moderating / spam filtering worked better in Disqus than Commento.
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/
If you wanted to “own” the data, you could periodically scrape the tweet’s comments.
I think there’s a cool product somewhere in there.
It was originally just a tiny little project, amazing how things grow.
> 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-...
It's bit naive. Every company exists to increase their revenue.
