Ask HN: How do you handle comments on your blog? - faitswulff
======
kayamon
Got rid of them years ago. Never looked back.

Comments require moderating. If you're not prepared to do that, outsource it
to somewhere like reddit or HN where others can do it for you, and do it
better.

But mostly I got rid of it because my blog is about _opinions_. I have an
opinion. And the only thing you'll get by allowing comments, is someone
underneath your delightful article telling you your opinion is wrong.

~~~
KajMagnus
What is your blog about, if I may ask?

Since it's about opinions, I'm guessing it's maybe about music and movies,
where there is no "true" answer about if the music/movie/etc is "good"?

Would you expect _blog comments_ for a blog post X of yours, to be more about
opinions, than _comments at a social news aggr site_ , about the same blog
post X?

~~~
kayamon
[http://www.codersnotes.com](http://www.codersnotes.com), if you really want
to go see it. Coding and tech stuff.

I've generally found that there's definitely a difference in tone between blog
comments and comments on HN/Reddit. People tend to be more direct (in a bad
way) on a blog.

~~~
KajMagnus
Thanks for the link. I read "In Search Of The Lost Program", interesting
analogies you found, I think. Ok then I better understand how it can be both
softw dev & opinions at the same time :- )

------
oaf357
I don't anymore. Low quality, racism, and spam essentially led to me removing
commenting altogether. I have considered creating threads on HN or Reddit for
commenting but that doesn't feel right.

~~~
KajMagnus
What is your blog about, if I may ask? I'm curious since it sometimes attracts
racist comments? Maybe the blog is about society and politics and people, I'm
wondering?

What about a commenting system where comments won't appear until after
approval, for new posters? And once someone has posted say 7 comments that
were all okay and you approved, then that person's comments get approved
automatically? (because then you a bit trust that person)

I think it's sometimes a bit sad when I cannot mention something interesting &
related to the blog post, that could be meaningful for the author & other
readers to know about. Or maybe ask something, or ...

Why does creating threads at say Reddit not feel right?

What benefits do you see with using Reddit instead of blog comments?

------
borplk
No comments.

They were cool back in early 2000s when Web 2.0 was hip and the internet was
more friendly and innocent.

There was no Twitter and social networks were limited.

Having comments was viewed as giving others a voice who would otherwise be
somewhat forced to just be readers.

Today there is no shortage of places for people to shout their thoughts.

------
stevekemp
My blog is static, when comments are submitted they are POSTed to one dynamic
end-point (i.e. a CGI-script) which writes them to "comments/$file".

I moderate by moving to "comments/good/$file", or "comments/spam/$file" as
appropriate. Then I pull them down to my desktop (via rsync) as part of my
build-process to include all the comments beneath "comments/good".

In short my blog is static, comments get written to disc, and the next time I
rebuild the blog I pick up new comments - unless they're spam. The CGI also
sends me an email so I know to do the necessary every few hours/days.

Of course moderation, and spam-detection, is annoying. So I outsource that to
[https://blogspam.net/](https://blogspam.net/) which is a service I created &
maintain.

------
tedmiston
I don't currently have comments on my Ghost blog, but I do watch Twitter and
HN for discussions of the posts though.

I've been thinking of adding something like Disqus to have comments on the
page.

~~~
KajMagnus
How do you watch for Twitter and HN discussions about the posts? Do you use
some automatic tool?

I'm creating embedded comments software, and I've been thinking about trying
to make that software find and auto-link to [discussions about the blog post]
at HN / Reddit / Twitter etc.

Maybe those discussions could be represented as a special type of blog comment
— so other people could _upvote_ [the discussion that happens at HN about the
blog post], and also so you could easily _delete_ the link to that
discussion...

... Or you could add a followup comment, about that discussion, by replying to
the auto-generated comment that links to HN, like: "Interesting discussion
that talks about ...." — so you can type a quick summary of what people said
at HN, for visitors at your blog, who are short of time.

~~~
tedmiston
HNWatcher emails me whenever my blog is mentioned on HN.

I also use Google Alerts.

I don't have any like this for Twitter, but it would be nice to have.
Currently I just watch a search query for the article title or url in the days
after publishing. Or I create a standing query in TweetDeck, but that only
works on desktop.

Aggregating the discussions across channels sounds interesting. Embedding that
on the post page would be sweet.

~~~
KajMagnus
Thanks for the info. I looked into if those things can be done automatically,
and ... I think so:

For HN, there's
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newest](https://news.ycombinator.com/newest)
which the software could monitor, and detect links to one's blog. And Reddit
also has a latest-submissions feed. At both Reddit and Twitter, one can search
for URLs.

Seems it's possible to auto link to submissions at HN, Reddit, and to Twitter
tweets, then.

And Google Alerts can publish mentions of URLs to RSS feeds, so maybe can find
& link to [other blog post that mention one's own blog post]. (There's
webmentions .. not all blogs use that.) ... maybe Google Alerts has API
restrictions & rate limits, so maybe won't work.

If each discussion that happens somewhere else, gets posted at one's blog, by
the comments software, in the shape of [a comment with a link to the
discussion] — then one would automatically get a notification about the remote
discussion (since each comment generates a notification to the blog owner).

------
KajMagnus
I built an open source alternative to Disqus. I have a list of 100? blog posts
I'm planning to write ... and then I'll use it. I've added a few improvements
over Disqus that makes the comments simpler to navigate (if they're really
many) and also for finding the most recent comments (which otherwise isn't
possible, since the commmets are threaded).

Here's the blog & comments: [https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-
comments/](https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/) (that's the only
blog post thus far).

If you want to read more: [https://www.talkyard.io/blog-
comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments)

