from Hacker News

Disqus, a dark commenting system

by supz_k on 2/5/21, 4:17 AM with 264 comments

• by xfz on 2/5/21, 11:16 AM

  Title should probably have [Advert] prefix or something.

  That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did.

  The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).

• by carlbordum on 2/5/21, 1:54 PM

  Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels.

  This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to us on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/, https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments

• by throw14082020 on 2/5/21, 8:59 AM

  The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced.

  I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.

• by learyjk on 2/5/21, 3:03 PM

  Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's functionality by directing users who had made comments to really shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/

  I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!

• by ivolimmen on 2/5/21, 7:02 AM

  At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The internet always have been a place where most stuff is free and people got used to that. At some point after that the dark parts and ad parts of the web will reside; but I do not think it will completely disappear.

• by andrewflnr on 2/5/21, 7:36 AM

  What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento (https://github.com/adtac/commento) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.

• by jwr on 2/5/21, 1:14 PM

  This is so amusing to me — I remember when Disqus was being built and beginning to gain traction, lofty ideas of "comments and discussions done right" were being thrown around.

  I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a third party, becoming tied to them and all the data tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future.

  Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-)

  Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or Google+, remember that?).

• by somedude895 on 2/5/21, 8:08 AM

  > ib.adnxs.com - Malware site, "Adnxs appeared as the eighth-biggest name in our Tracking the Trackers data

  This is AppNexus, the second-biggest display ad broker after Google. It can be argued that both Google and AppNexus facilitate the spreading of malware by injecting ads which sometimes aren't properly vetted, but simply calling it a malware site is very misleading.

• by outsomnia on 2/5/21, 8:05 AM

  Article only makes it clear at the end that it is an ad for author's "privacy first" competitor... which is a paid-for product.

• by h_anna_h on 2/5/21, 10:44 AM

  I have (had) a Disqus account that I connected to via my google account. I say had because I haven't been able to login in a year or so via firefox. I just get a page that says "There was an error submitting the form. If you're having difficulty, try repeating the action on https://disqus.com" with an annoying meme gift on the background. Luckily the title of the page says "Embed: CSRF verification failed (403)" but I have not been able to find a way to fix it. Oh well, I guess I won't be commenting on any site with disqus anytime soon.

  I wish there was some kind of service or plugin (preferably not based on a centralized service) where one could easily leave comments on any site even if the site itself did not support comments.

• by foxhop on 2/5/21, 1:41 PM

  If you are looking for a free hosted comment system, check out Remarkbox https://www.remarkbox.com

  I'm the founder and in 2021, the service is now Free for all to use.

  Check out my reasons for opening up the service to all here: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

  Big Tech must NOT have a monopoly on moderation!

• by darekkay on 2/5/21, 10:48 AM

  I've started collecting different ways to include blog comments a few years ago [1]. After using Disqus for several years, I've removed the comments on my blog and link to social networks instead (mostly Twitter and Mastodon).

  [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

• by grishka on 2/5/21, 5:49 PM

  > consider migrating from Disqus to a privacy-first commenting system. One such service is Hyvor Talk

  I see blocked requests to doubleclick.net, which is a Google advertising domain, on its website. And then a lot more third-party domains that weren't blocked. Such privacy, much wow.

• by eliben on 2/5/21, 1:08 PM

  Turned off Disqus on my blog a couple of years ago (https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2018/turning-off-blog-comments...) and have been generally happy since then.

• by polevaultweb on 2/5/21, 10:25 AM

  I'm using ReplyBox on all my sites and client sites, it's a lightweight and slick alternative https://getreplybox.com/

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 2/5/21, 12:04 PM

  Once, a number of years ago (Disqus has been around a while), I signed up for a Disqus account.

  As part of the process, the service showed me a page of comments from around the Web, and asked if they were mine, and, if so, would I like to associate them with the account.

  I was horrified. They included some...rather “rash” comments that I had made, over the years (I was not always the stuffy boomer that I am now). Many were quite old, and, I had thought, made anonymously.

  I scragged the process immediately, and made a vow to be a good boy, from then on (I had already made that choice, years earlier, but this solidified it).

  Nowadays, I deliberately associate myself with my online comments. I nuked my last anonymous account years ago.

  It is my opinion that anonymity is an illusion, these days. I feel that knowing my words can come back to haunt me, helps me to be more careful in what I say; just like in real life.

• by paulcarroty on 2/5/21, 10:52 AM

  Alternatives from my notes (never used them IRL):

  * https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman

  * https://github.com/schn4ck/schnack

• by jonnycomputer on 2/5/21, 1:11 PM

  I miss the golden age of blogs, bulletin boards, and of mailing lists, frankly. They are still out there, of course, but focus seems to have shifted. Twitter is so much more immediate, and I think it has displaced blog post consumption. To our detriment in many ways.

• by ogre_codes on 2/5/21, 9:47 AM

  Where are all the defenders claiming this is all necessary and great because it enables superior advertising? Whenever we have a Google or Facebook they always seem to crawl out of the woodwork, no love for the small businesses which rely on advertising here?

• by chrisMyzel on 2/5/21, 1:42 PM

  "disqusting" - thanks for the article!

• by unicornporn on 2/5/21, 7:23 AM

  The one thing you can't do as a developer in 2021 is claim innocence while you're letting these companies feast on your visitors data. You do know how these things work and you're assisting surveillance capitalism. You are complicit in your silent embedding of these tracking devices.

• by CA0DA on 2/5/21, 2:01 PM

  From a month ago: "Adding comments to a static blog with Mastodon"

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

• by rendall on 2/5/21, 5:05 PM

  I've been building a commenting system called Simple Comment that leverages free-tier offerings for hosting and data. So, you own it, hosting and data. It's at MVP status now, but it's as-yet pretty rough. You're welcome to try it out. I'd love feedback.

  https://simple-comment.netlify.app/

  Heck, be the first to leave a comment!

  It has one customer so far: my blog. https://blog.rendall.dev

• by morpheos137 on 2/5/21, 6:39 PM

  I am struggling to understand why anybody thought that "outsourcing" blog comments was a good idea. It seems like a really simple database function that could be self hosted easily.

• by m000 on 2/5/21, 12:09 PM

  FWIW, pi.hole with the default blacklist of domains blocks all but one of the listed tracker domains. Disqus still works with those domains blocked.

• by clairegraham on 2/5/21, 7:23 PM

  We used to have Disqus on our site and I can attest to it being a resource hog. We switched to Commento last year, which doesn't have as many features, but it shaved seconds off our page load time.

  My only complaint with Commento was that automated moderating / spam filtering worked better in Disqus than Commento.

• by EGreg on 2/5/21, 12:25 PM

  This is so stupid, by the way. Can’t Disqus simply use its OWN third party cookie in the back end to inform all these other sites and grab their information to display, even cache some of it? Disqus is being sloppy and just angering its own “customers” is the websites and users.

• by maciekmm on 2/5/21, 6:28 PM

  Shameless plug:

  I started building a small commenting system that fetches comments from social media postings (hackernews, reddit atm.)

  It's not released yet, but You can sign up to know when it's ready. https://popvox.dev/

• by youngdynasty on 2/6/21, 10:03 AM

  I’d rather just tweet a link to a blog post and let the discussion happen there. Plus, you get “free” eyeballs on it since it’ll appear in the commenter’s social graph.

  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.

• by pawurb on 2/5/21, 9:29 AM

  I've stopped using Disqus on my blog for exactly the reasons described. I've switched to https://commento.io/ and the site started loading noticably faster.

• by unicornporn on 2/5/21, 7:18 AM

  How is this GDPR compliant? What tracking is used for EU citizens? I've seen no consent notices here in the EU.

• by tanrax on 2/5/21, 5:50 PM

  I don't know why you use Disqus when there is an Opensource alternative: Glosa --> https://github.com/glosa/glosa-server

• by winrid on 2/6/21, 4:58 AM

  These are actually all the reasons I built https://fastcomments.com

  It was originally just a tiny little project, amazing how things grow.

• by aww_dang on 2/5/21, 2:36 PM

  There are some interesting features in Disqus's "import comments" feature. Most of the fun has been closed. But yeah, for vanilla purposes the criticism is deserved.

• by tyingq on 2/5/21, 1:17 PM

  I wonder if anyone has considered using Gmail or another free email provider to be their comment backer. You get an API that already supports threading.

• by atomicson on 2/5/21, 8:43 AM

  We forget, the main reason we post a comment is to be read by others. So there's nothing wrong because it is "you" wrote the comments and it is "you". Sure you already read their Terms of Service (ToS) before embedding their product in your website. There is no free lunch as there are some costs to develop and maintain a product. If you are a coder, develop your own commenting system is not hard. They just do what they do for survival, like everybody else.

• by 101008 on 2/5/21, 12:41 PM

  Is there a good alternative that it is easy to migrate to from Disqus? I dont want to lose all the comments that I had on my blog.

• by Quanttek on 2/5/21, 7:16 PM

  > How does Disqus sell your visitors' data with thirdparties without your consent?

  > Actually, you give them the consent when you agree to their privacy policy.

  I doubt that this is legal according to the GDPR.

  Also, didn't Mozilla also have a commenting system? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-...

• by marcjensen on 2/5/21, 9:58 AM

  > Obviously, advertising companies do everything to increase their revenue.

  It's bit naive. Every company exists to increase their revenue.

• by CaptArmchair on 2/5/21, 8:39 AM

  I've been around long enough to have seen how comments on the Web emerged from innocuous guest books and a feature in personal blogging and ended up being un-ironically slapped to any 5-line piece of content.

  Disqus and their ilk exist because of one reason only: convenience.

  (a) You don't need to install software and a database to store comments, (b) you don't need to maintain that software or worry that it's an attack vector (c) you don't need to pay for hosting and (d) you don't need to worry about comment spam.

  While that's all valid, I feel a moral question lurks beneath the surface.

  If you host a website, you are establishing a bond of trust with visitors. And your visitors can and will hold you accountable for the experience you offer. A foundational principle and the promise of the Web was (and still is) that information is shared in an equitable fashion. That doesn't mean you have to serve content for free or peanuts (there's nothing wrong with paid content). It does mean that no matter what you do, you can never outsource responsibility over what you put on line.

  This pertains both to functionality as well as the content itself.

  Companies like Disqus have jumped into a niche: removing the costs (time / money) of self-hosting and managing comments. It's totally fine to pull their infrastructure into your own website via - ultimately - an <iframe> tag. But you do have a responsibility towards your visitors to do your due diligence and assert that the services you're relying on won't compromise your own bond of trust with your visitors.

  Asserting that due diligence is a big issue. Not everyone is doing this, and enough companies and individuals will shirk their responsibility for the sake of convenience and costs. Over the past 15 years, the Web has become riddled with embeds, widgets and iframes. It's not just Disqus, it's literally any copy-and-paste code which people add in matter-of-factly without considering the consequences.

  WordPress, for instance, offers oembed support out of the box. Drop in a YouTube or Instagram link and it will automagically transform into a widget. Extremely convenient, but it's an open door for trackers.

  https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/

  This leaves you, as a visitor of websites, in a bind: you can't trust websites to not have a tracker

  In the EU, that's where the GDPR does make a difference. If you want to be compliant, you will need to either jump through several technical hoops to give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of trackers... or you simply stop relying on third-party embeds all together since they now pose a legal liability.

  In fact, the GDPR has also made it harder to slap a comment box on your website in general. The moment you do, you are now considered a data controller. And visitors can demand that you provide them with insights in how you manage their comments.

  The GDPR is actively enforced and companies and individuals do get fined for not adhering to the rules.

  https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/?insights

• by darepublic on 2/5/21, 7:12 AM

  roll your own commenting system

• by blackcats on 2/5/21, 8:58 AM

  This is why I dropped disqus and made my own comment system

  https://bsdnerds.org/comments-static-site/

• by throw8932894 on 2/5/21, 10:19 AM

  Is there a way to use github for commenting system? I have a site hosted on github, most users are devs...