Then I built an alternative using free Cloudflare Worker
https://github.com/est/req4cmt
It's a simple service that transform comment POST form data to JSON, append to a .jsonl file, then do a `git push`
It renders comments by `git fetch` from a .jsonl file from a remote repo, or simply via raw.githubusercontent.com if your repo was hosted by Github.
The advantange over Github issue/discussion based comment plugins:
1. All data is stored a .git
2. no login of any sort
Github OAuth login might leak all your repo data along with your `access_token` to the plugin provider.
The `git push` works for any remote. You can choose github/gitlab or whatever.
https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comme...
Here is another one https://docs.coralproject.net/
But, the solution I've been looking for/prototyping is one that lets people comment from the Fadiverse, so it will also double as a feed. Nothing to show yet, but one-day maybe.
If I where to ditch it to save the money, I'd look into integrating Mastodon into the page, I saw somewhere that they used Mastodon as their comment system (it's basically a thread on Mastodon that is embedded in the blog page).
It is now 2025, Unless it is an extremely popular site where every blog post has hundreds of comments. For most blogs hosting your own comment section shouldn't even be a rounding error or expensive. Why do we still have to put up with Disqus?
Blog like Michael Tsai [1] do it just fine. You submit a comment it render the page on server.
[1]https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/29/ios-26-0-1-and-ipados-26-...
Still, since we do not get that many comments these days, I’ll probably postpone it and just provide a static render of existing / historical comments which does have value for archival and discussion purposes.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png
The size of it, above the comments (and under as well of course). That is madness.
I'll have to check some of the alternative listed in here. I could just code it but I really don't want to deal with spam and moderation... Or maybe I'll remove comments altogether.
That grants people an easy way to discuss content and to check any prior discussion, if any.
Something like https://lists.sr.ht/~shugyousha/public-inbox for example.
Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.
I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...
I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.
HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se.
There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.
But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:
- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).
- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.
- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.
- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" <https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".
¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/
³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
have been pleasant.
We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
Utterance.es is GitHub issues backed comments, which is an inherent barrier to commenting, but YMMV if that's an actual problem (generally the value of unbarred comment sections is abysmal). Like remark42, it's open source, but you're relying on a third party's servers.
[0]: https://github.com/umputun/remark42
[1]: https://utteranc.es/
I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/
I like my implementation cause it blends really well with the blog making it looks almost native.
transferring the burden of maintenance - curation to a social media platform (and a slightly more open one to boot) has been a complete win.
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
Example:https://dalevross.rosssquared.org/blog/2013/08/16/pi-lovin.h...
If anyone is able to confirm that they're not seeing ads either, I would be grateful.
But for my use case, I like having the Pihole UI to see the charts and it's nice for temporarily unblocking one domain, etc.
Here is an excellent alternative to running Pihole that I've used before: https://www.geoghegan.ca/unbound-adblock.html
There is FOSS option built on nostr you could explore called nocomment. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment.
License is public domain.
Pfft. Half of the fun on the Internet is arguing with people about what other people said. I like to link to this blog post with over 500 replies about a constructivist who doesn't believe in the well-definedness of real numbers and shows up in the comments to respond to people: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th...
I really do not believe that blog would be better by not having comments enabled.
<https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-myth-of-the-algorithm...>
To the extent that HN does utilise specific procedural mechanisms to adjust the priority of content, it's virtually always away from the typical patterns of algorithmic amplification: less emotion, less outrage, fewer hot takes, less nationalism and relgious flamewars, and specifically toward "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation": <>>13108404 >.
It would be possible, yes, though incredibly disingenuous, to argue that what HN is doing is itself amplification. Yes, any curation is an amplification of some content over other, but in a world where "algorithmic content" means clickbait, brain-crack, and stickyness, HN is quite clearly aiming for something else.
Another facile objection is that HN fails to achieve its stated goals. Well, yes, it does, and the mods freely admit this (see, e.g.: <>>20188101 >). Why does HN fall short? Because the problem is hard (see, e.g., <>>16163743 >).
If power-law dynamics were purely the result of manipulative algorithmic amplification, we'd see them only in online media subject to such amplification. And that's simply not the case. Power laws are fundamental to not only all of human communications and interactions (word and letter frequencies, for example, neither of which suggest a strong influence by algorithmic amplification), but to all manner of natural phenomena, including those entirely outside the realm of biological activity (e.g., frequency/magnitude plots of earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar novae).
And in the realm of interpersonal online communications, HN's goals and interventions (mods, voting, and some programmed mechanisms) are desperately trying to swim upstream. As someone whose online tenure pre-dates the Web and extends to pre-Eternal September Usenet, HN has done remarkably well, and outlived many of its antecedents' and competitors' useful or entire lives (Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Google+, et cetera). Trust me, I'd love to see it do better (a view often voiced by mods as well). But in an ordinal ranking with what actually exists it's an exemplar.
This isn't a nitpick, it's a core and central point with (literally) universal applicability.
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 :)
> showing some CORS error
In my case, I found it annoying when cookies gradually stopped working, and eventually I had to make the software use custom HTTP headers instead of cookies.
> Seems that mostly spammers comment
The more interesting the contents of the blog is, the more real humans will like it and post comments? (if they can find it)
But a "Our company posts something each day, even if nothing has happened" blog, or AI fluff, attracts only spammers?
(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)
You can look up your Google ad profile and see if "pregnant" is one of your account's attributes. Facebook has a similar page somewhere.
https://podcastindex.org/apps podcasting 2.0 app index.
