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...
146 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadMy 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.
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.
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.
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.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n...
Probably, good enough for a Wordpress plugin.
Maybe post your blog with something "unique[ish]"?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
Alas, they're used seldom.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/ [2]: https://giscus.app/
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.
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.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com
https://doomberg.substack.com
https://dubnationhq.com
Are some examples.
Disclaimer: I work at Substack.
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.
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.
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.
This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.
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.
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.
There aren't too many useful or any toxic comments, but I attribute that more to the lack of readership and interest than anything else.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/