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Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?
138 points by skilled on March 30, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 138 comments
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...




I have been blogging for about 14 years - 7 of these on a blog dedicated for software engineering topics.

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.


I've been blogging in some form or another since the late 90s, but consistently on the same blog for going on 15 years.

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.


I have been blogging for twenty years, unfortunately, not on same blog though. But I was also using WordPress and comment spam was virtually nil.

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.


My blog dates back in some fashion or another to some point in the 1990s and before the word "blog". It's been through so many different technologies. The only "off-the-shelf" one used Drupal for a few years. Most of the rest were bespoke. Many versions and archives have since been lost though I've tried to keep continuity where I can (the current blog has some URL redirects all the way back from the second version on Drupal after the last major loss of archives).

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.


I can confirm this with what I've experienced. I've blogged since around 2003(ish?) and around 5 years ago I decided that it's just not worth the hazzle.

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.


Maybe that's an idea for a product: find discussions on HN, Twitter, Reddit, FB etc about your blog post and embed them on the blog where you would usually see the comments. Not sure how big the market is, but...


There are ways to automatically grab feeds of specific hashtags on Twitter

Maybe post your blog with something "unique[ish]"?


Or turn tweets into webmentions using https://brid.gy/


I've thought about this, and would love a browser extension that would let me see all the past discussions when I visit a website that has previously been submitted to HN. Maybe one day I'll make it.


Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/what-hacker-news-s...

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/what-hacker-n...


Comment sibling of yours by turoczy suggests that already exists?

> 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.


I believe Lobste.rs is a good citizen and sends a webmention. Other services could follow suit. There'd be no need for an additional product then.


> Not sure how big the market is, but...

Probably, good enough for a Wordpress plugin.


If the content on your blog is valuable, people will discuss it anyway in various places where discussion happens. They will discuss it on HN, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, the fediverse. Everywhere where it’s convenient.

I’ve come to the conclusion that adding one more discussion outlet won’t concentrate the discussion in one place. Even when said outlet sits right next to the posts themselves and is ‘canonical’, that’s just not going to happen. On the contrary, it will just contribute to the dispersion of discussion.

Besides, having comments under an article means that the article stops being a document and starts being an application [0], and that’s something I’d like to avoid. So, no comments on my blog.

But I do plan to link to HN threads so it’s easier to find discussion where it happens. I just don’t see value in it happening next to the articles themselves.

[0]: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/


As a counterpoint, I dislike any blog that links back to HN for discussion.

It’s not a playground for everyone’s blogs to use, and there is no guarantee an article will be posted at all - unless the author resorts to systematically posting his own content, which is another undesirable outcome.

On Twitter, you might get different people posting about it, and accompanying thread, but no way to find them. I think there’s still room for comment systems.


And HN threads die and lock out after a time, there’s no long term commenting.

But for most people who have a blog and don’t have a “trusted group of commenters” the value of comments is low to nil.


I think the idea of the participatory web came at a time when people who were participating in the web were a lot kinder and a lot more curios and open about the web in general. I remember being able to scroll through a few forums on which I spent time and being able to engage in conversations with complete strangers with relative ease (late 90s early 00s). At this point, even a somewhat harmless comment on here can result in abuse very quickly or in a swift escalation towards uncivilized behavior. It's still vastly better to a lot of the other arenas of discussion though.

Which says firstly something about the quality of the discourse that can occur within the comments section and the tone of these comments.

Comments have also devolved into a collection of memes and one-liners that don't add anything to the discussion in the best case scenario. At worst, they lead to my previous point. As gregdoesit said in the top comment, a lot of comments have evolved into straight up spam and, similarly, on my blog, I added my contact email address if someone wants to follow up or inquire about anything I post there.

So I think that the participatory internet is dead to some extent. I never got this "comment on a news article" thing either. If a bomb goes off and tragically kills 5 people your "thoughts and prayers + praying-emoji" doesn't add anything. Commenting "fake news" also doesn't add anything. A team losing a game 2-0 or 38-0 also doesn't need a comment section "no, they didn't!".

What I think I'm trying to say is that there is little to be gained, it ads additional maintenance overhead and it can also become toxic very quickly. An older page I had use to provide comments but most of my time was deleting the 10-15 comments posted every day by bots.

Also, the irony of me posting a comment about being anti-comment isn't lost on me.


Yup the general populace have entered the web.


Other than spam and comments of little value ("+1"), even the comments that do seem human-like generally suck. Typically, they did not read the article at all or not with any care. They're not there to try and understand your point, they just want to drop their opinion. It makes you feel like everything you wrote was in vain.

And there's the hypersensitivity these days. I'm a boring blogger that writes about dry highly niche technical subjects. None that stir the pot. The least divisive topics one can imagine. And still I got burned. One of my pieces got a fair amount of reads and from referrals I could see quite a few came from Twitter, which I normally avoid like the plague.

Checking the sources there, I was in disbelief. I'm not going to be repeating the exact fragment, but imagine writing on your blog something like this:

"So to operate this control, you use your keyboard to..."

And on Twitter somebody behind your back goes:

"Keyboard!??! What fucking ableist douchebag is this idiot guy"?

And their (luckily) small bubble clapped in agreement of what a dark character I am. We all know it's typical of Twitter, but I always figured it happens to other people, not to boring me. I guess the bar really is that low now, and writing anything at all has become a liability. Even more so if you consider that future bad faith interpretations are likely to be even more extreme, so they'll be digging up your stuff with a passion.

I guess I got lucky. Had my sin be slightly larger, they'd likely be calling my employer for my termination.

Which begs the question, with this type of hostility, why write at all?


We've had several clients ask us to disable their blog comments in the last 3 or so years and the reason was always moderation. Even when the comments generate good conversation or produce something of value SEO or community wise, it's not worth the effort to weed out the bad comments and conversation you don't want happening on the blog.

For our clients, it was almost always turning into a political discussion. Even on posts talking about something as innocuous as an event that was held for the company's employees, people would turn up and start talking about something political and it would eventually devolve into threats and dox attempts. It just wasn't worth the moderation effort anymore.

Spam can be blocked automatically by tools fairly easy but actual conversations unrelated to the topic at hand required too much work. And in one case, threats led to police involvement and that was more than the client was willing to deal with.


Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards. Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets.

Besides that, I think there is a point in removing comments and interactivity in general. They hardly ever invite any interesting discussion. Comments are generally impersonal and low effort and invite a lot of shitty behavior.

If you have something substantive to say, respond in a blog post of your own.

If you have something personal to say, send an email. This is scary and intimate, but also permits you to actually talk to a person without the performative aspect of doing it in public.


> Botspam killed blog comments, same way it killed discussion boards.

The discussion boards I'm on that are still active do not have a spam problem. The usual methods of limiting new accounts and giving established accounts a bit of moderation power (e.g. several accounts flagging a post as spam hides it from other users) seems to be sufficient as long as the traffic is there.

I think the bigger problem in most cases is that people have left for more centralized platforms because the barrier to entry is lower, or some parts of the user experience are better. One part of the UX that centralized platforms do better is allowing users to get updates on more conversations in one place. Polling a large number of sites gets annoying, and email is not a great notification system (web push notifications are improving this).

More federated systems could help here, though I haven't been especially impressed with Matrix or ActivityPub-based social networking so far.


Why doesn’t HN have botspam then?


Larger forums like HN and Reddit have the economies of scale on their side. They have a lot more time and money to throw on solving the problem than a blogger or someone who runs a phpBB-forum as a hobby.


> They have a lot more time and money to throw on solving the problem

No, they get others to do it


Traffic + downvotes. A blog may have downvotes but not the human traffic to utilize them


Beyond downvotes. there's flagging. It doesn't take many flags from higher-karma accounts to kill a comment from a new account, nor does it take many killed comments to shadowban a new account.

To protect against false positives, accounts with enough karma can vouch for dead comments to bring them back to life.


HN have a different approach. Here in HN, new accounts are restricted to comments only, the restriction will slowly remove as the account get older and have amble "karma" (sorry, I am not sure what term for here in HN) then they will gain the ability to vote later on.

Also HN prevents people from voting on parent comments if they respond to it. So if they commented it, then it is considered as voted. If they up/downvote the comment and then posted a response to that, HN automatically replace the vote to comment response.

I like this approach because it is a great way to have engaging discussion than trying to drive meaningless and irrelevant comments as top comments.


HN has @dang!


> Even if it's not link spam, the bots are using comment fields for C&C for botnets

Any examples of this that aren’t just PoCs?


It's very hard to actually demonstrate without a doubt, but a lot of the blog spam you see basically has a very clear numbers station vibe. No links, just fairly obviously machine generated word salad.


It should be as easy as linking a malware sample, no?

I think the spam you’re referring to is usually targeting the “Website” field of Wordpress comments, which turns the username of the commenter into a hyperlink.


I can absolutely confirm that as a thing, but I can't confirm my employment history.


How do you use comment fields for a botnet?


Hosts can check a specific URL for instructions, which can be in the form of a blog comment


I run a pretty large NBA blog, that gets crazy traffic. We decided to spend energy and time moderating comments. Basically we go by "don't be an asshole", and while it's onerous, the community that has sprung up around it is incredible. We have people who've been commenting since 2007, and it was worth it if you have the time to spare. My $0.02


This. Comments, community, and moderation can work wonderfully at a certain (Goldilocks, aka "mid-") scale. Smaller (unless you're deep in some true nano-niche), and it's a load of work for little gain. Much larger, and...yuck.


The problem isn't having comments on your blog, it's having locally scoped identities to comment on your blog. It essentially removes all cost for "destructive" participation, whether it be spam, harassment or other trolling.

This is solved either by moving commenting entirely off-site to a larger network, or by using identities from a larger scope.


Shameless plug: I built Cactus Comments (https://cactus.chat/).

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.


That's not particularly useful without a reputation system.

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.


My blog using Cactus Comments for reference: https://karmanyaah.malhotra.cc/

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.


How about an OAuth system where you can add conditions like, the user has validated an address in a certain town, or worked for a certain company? What part of the identity would you scope by?


OpenID, the original OpenID was built for bloggers: your blog address was your login. It mostly only ever verified that you were also (likely) a blogger and what that address was. It built a unique web of commenters who were also bloggers. It was something of a shining golden age of blog commenting when OpenID was just about everywhere.

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.


That's really interesting. Finding the details of this was a bit hard, but I found this article (2007): https://blogger.googleblog.com/2007/12/openid-commenting.htm... Thanks for the bit of history


I do not even consider commenting on random blogs. It feels that got completely taken over by bots and shills and angry angry people a long time ago.

Upon further reflection, it's also about sense of community, or lack thereof - on social networks, I know who's reading my comments and I can engage with them. On blogs... I have no idea who else is reading it, I may never come back to see any responses, I may not care about anybody else's comments without context to put them in, so neither the incentive nor feedback loop are there for me.

(I may comment on e.g. Rock Paper Shotgun, but I don't consider it a blog - it's an online magazine and it has both the sense of community and daily return value. )


Running any public forum mostly means moderation. Trawling through hundreds of spam comments that got through the filters, to find the occasional jewel, ceased to motivate me.

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.


Do you know if webmentions do anything against spam or if they just defer that problem until the technology gets popular enough for spammers to catch on?


I have not found webmentions-specific antispam processes. I suppose that, a whitelist/greylist/blacklist approach at host level might keep it manageable: if a social host can't moderate its spammers, then it is not worth accepting traffic from.


Yes, it's called Vouch and it's documented well on the indieweb wiki. https://indieweb.org/Vouch


Social platforms did a tremendously effective job of training and conditioning the users to not escape their walled gardens and not even click links, let alone read or comment on blog posts. And platforms like Twitter bury tweets with links anyway, so few users get to see them in the first place.


For Wordpress you may use an ActivityPub plugin and have your commenting coming from the Fediverse.


Our company blog https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1 regularly gets good amounts of comments from our community, the way we implement it we see it as a key opportunity for our customers to open dialogue with us and get their feedback. We have no plans to disable comments, benefits far outweigh the positives.

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)


Can you please tell me what tools you use to remove spam accounts and spam comments ?


Blogging without comments is weird to me. I have a small handful of blogs, one of which just turned 21 years old, and the reason I blog is the comments. I want to hear what others have to say. I want to know when I am wrong. I am not an unquestionable pillar of truth, I am a dude that finds things interesting and wants to talk about it. I want to learn more, and the collective peanut gallery inevitably knows more than I do.

My whole reason for doing it is a two way interaction. I think not enough people can just talk these days though, they get angry and mean about the silliest stuff. That leads to thinner skinned people just not willing to actually listen to anyone else, which is a shame. The most hate I ever got was a post about Go binary sizes of all things - literal personal attacks. Like I just wanted to have a conversation about compilers and people were insulting my mental abilities.

So basically on the one hand can understand why people would not have comments, but on the other hand I have no idea why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.


> and the reason I blog is the comments. [...] I have no idea why you would blog at all without them aside from ego.

I would have not written any blog post in a decade if that (EDIT: comments instead of ego) was my motivation. My blog features a grand total of 5 comments in 12 years. Writing my posts takes a lot of time and effort - they are very (by today's standards) technical, and very long, and no matter where I try posting them to get any kind of attention, I just don't get it. I decided not to care - I now write posts for a reason similar to what motivates people to sail through Atlantic alone or run a marathon. It just feels really good to get to the finishing line. But it's also a fact that I would have been writing way more often if I knew the posts will be read and discussed; I'm just finding my ways to emotionally cope with the knowledge that they won't.

Yeah, I'm just grumbling, so don't mind me. Still, I'm jealous. Being able to use comments as a reason for writing would be great. So, be happy that you can do this!


Books don't have comment sections either. Neither do plays. Do you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play does so only because of ego? Some do, surely, but many just have information or insight or entertainment they want to make available to others. In some subset of those cases, the incremental value of adding comments is nil (or worse). Maybe it's those who do crave comments who are blogging out of nothing but ego ... or maybe such dismissiveness is just generally ill considered.


The author for "Scary Go Round" comics (which are turned into books) has great conversations with his commenters:

https://badmachinery.com/comic/those-longjohns/#comments


> Do you think everyone who writes a book or stages a play does so only because of ego

Yes. Especially in this day and age when there are other options, like a Blog, with a comment section.

You write a book because you want something to put on your resume.

A notable exception here would be Andy Weir's "The Martian", which started as a blog, with a comment section, where he received many corrections as he developed it.


Just as a counter point, I wrote a book because I wanted to prove to myself that I could. It will probably never see the light of day, but I did it and I found the experience valuable. But, maybe you are just talking about people who sell books? In that case, I think the majority of authors are not getting rich, famous, or hired for the number of books on their resume.


> I wanted to prove to myself that I could

I'm pretty sure the need to prove yourself to yourself is the truest literary form of freudian ego.


Only? You can't imagine a selfless motivation? Someone wanting to share or help others without requiring recompense and/or feedback? Just want to be clear here.


The thought that anyone would want to read what you have to say alone is ego.

> share or help others without requiring recompense

Most authors of book seek actual monetary compensation


> The thought that anyone would want to read what you have to say alone is ego.

I hope that was a generic "you" and not intended as an insult. In any case, it's untrue except for a definition of "ego" so expansive as to be meaningless. Is it ego to believe that some subset of people you already know and have some affinity with might derive some benefit or enjoyment from something you write? For many bloggers the mere possibility of that is sufficient to put the writing in a public place instead of a private diary, but they'd also be quite content if that didn't happen.

I'm trying hard not to be as derogatory as you are with your implication that others are thin-skinned or egotistical, but I suspect that this goalpost-moving on "ego" reflects your own motivations more than any general reality. So does the "weirdness" you mention. Perhaps you should consider that other people are motivated differently than you are and that's OK. There's nothing weird or egotistical at all about wanting to communicate with others in a non-transactional way, for its own sake.


Disclose: I'm a founder of a commenting system

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.


In my opinion there's an interesting middle ground, where you don't have comments but allow (moderated) linkbacks (I forget the name of the modern variant of this…) from other blog posts mentioning yours.


I think you're talking about Webmentions.[0]

[0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention


I think Webmentions could be the solution to the problem: They allow anyone to comment on and add to your writings without requiring to open an account on each and every blog and they endorse elaborate, "readworthy" responses.

Alas, they're used seldom.


Unfortunately, Webmentions are also still a spam vector that needs moderation.

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 depends on what you are doing. Imagine a blog about model steam trains, say 3.5" guage. It is not general interest.

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.


Small blog here [1]. Had very positive experiences with comments powered by GitHub Discussions (giscus [2]). No Spam so far and the comments were on-topic.

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/ [2]: https://giscus.app/


Part of it might be due to the rise of static site generators which almost by definition do not directly support comments without having an additional non-static service, external or not.

Even just having an endpoint to submit comments seems a lot to ask when the site otherwise doesn't even need a database.

Ultimately I think the need/want for discussion is better served by different websites rather than asking every site to provide comments. It would be nice if browsers could integrate or at least link those comments for you.


There are a number of commenting solutions that work with SSGs. Two in particular which may appeal to the HN crowd are Utterances[0] and the more recent giscus[1], each of which uses GitHub services (GitHub Issues and GitHub Discussions, respectively). Assuming your commenters don't have a problem with having to log into GitHub to say something, either of these will work. I've also written in the past[2] about some other SSG-friendly possibilities.

[0]: https://utteranc.es/

[1]: https://giscus.app/

[2]: https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2020/10/conversation-piece/


That was the case for me: I built a static site generator in 500 lines of Python.

Adding comments took me a long time and lots of effort in comparison – I described that on the blog too: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/potion/

It's been up for almost a month and I already engaged one person. That's less than discussions on Mastodon, but it serves as an obvious meeting point for readers, so I guess it's not entirely a wasted effort.


I've been writing a non-tech-related Wordpress blog for 12 years, with comments turned on the whole time. Akismet automatically filters out almost all spam, and pre-approval for first-time commenters catches the rest. I find the comments usually positive, sometimes helpful, and never abusive. I can only conclude that some threshold of popularity, and subjects (like politics and maybe tech) that draw the wrong kinds of people, turn comments into cesspools. Since I'm not blogging for money or fame, or about rage-inducing topics, I'm fine.

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 has been exactly my experience as well. I've got a blog detailing how I built a small sailboat and the trips I've taken in it. The comments have all been either supportive or questions about some specific detail. I only get maybe 5 comments a year, but it's a good feeling to know my website has helped someone out.


I shut them off on Tedium for three reasons:

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.


at this point boing boing’s forum is better than their blog, without an ad blocker it’s almost impossible to read


Hm... What are comments like in 2022, I ask myself.

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.


Blog comments are great when you have a high readership, and lot of quality comments.

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.


One of my most memorable and proud moments was when I was a junior developer. I wrote a blog about ScriptCS and how it worked (in the very early days when documentation was sparse so it took significant research). One of the (very few) comments on my blog was Glenn Block - a man I considered a borderline legend in my .NET field - commenting very positively and thanking me for my effort. It seems so minor and silly now but it was an incredibly energising experience.

I guess people are getting the same kinds of feedback through Twitter now but it feels so much more... I dunno, inauthentic?


I run a tech/business blog (thetechee.com) and the amount of spam I get is nauseating. I thought it'll reduce when I switched from Blogger to WordPress, but it became much worse.

A recent shocker was someone (or a spambot) posting links to supposed child porn on my site. Don't worry, I didn't bother to click it...

I haven't yet shut down my comment section, but I set it such that I must approve all new comments. Needless to say, I have a backlog of 600+ comments to approve, and 99% of them are spam so I just don't bother


I just started writing a blog and I went through this thought process then. The reason I don't have comments on the blog is that I don't want to spend time moderating, and I usually access blogs from a forum like HN or reddit, where there is already a discussion. I know there is some fraction of the community that searches for blogs directly, but the main engagement I get is from reddit, so most of the audience doesn't need a comments section.


On my own blog - started over twenty years ago - spam was always a problem. I'd sometimes get good exchanges involving real people, but not often enough to be worth wading through the spam.

On the few blogs I've visited in the last few years that have comments, there seems to be another problem - groupthink. Such blogs tend to attract very devoted regulars, who often converge on a very particular set of opinions on the blog's topics. Sure, they have their internal disagreements and conflicts, just like the mean girls in Heathers, but that's nothing compared to the way they'll gang up and harass anyone who doesn't kowtow to the clique as a whole. Even when it's a not-quite-regular (i.e. repeat visitor over a long period) in generally good standing, disagreeing on a fairly minor point, they'll get absolutely hammered into silence or departure. Sometimes it's not deliberate or coordinated, just people who all like to have their own say and don't stop to consider whether the not-so-nice thing they're about to say has already been said by ten others. Other times it seems more like a peer-pressure thing, scoring points (or even competing) with each other by each trying to take their best shot at the Target Of The Day. This consolidation tends to compound over time, too, so the oldest blogs tend to be the worst afflicted.

Either way, it turns the comment section into an exclusive social club, and precludes any substantive discussion. I can think of several blogs where I've seen this play out, and not one where real discussion has continued over the long term. So yes, maybe there are some exceptions somewhere, but at a first approximation blog comments are (and certainly should be) a thing of the past.


I see a lot of comments here about post spam.

There seems to be a relatively simple solution - require a proof-of-work puzzle to be solved before the server will accept your comment submission. Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.

Valid users submit comments very infrequently compared to an automated bot. They won't be inconvenienced if you set the difficulty right, and their environmental impact and electricity costs will be negligible.

Bots will be attempting to submit spam comments en-masse, and so will need to be spending a large amount of money on electricity for solving these problems. The expected value per problem they solve will be extremely low, and so they'll actually be losing money due to electricity costs - and as for environmental impact, they could have been burning that CPU to mine bitcoin or something anyway (and, after they notice the servers they run their bots on start getting pegged on CPU, they'll quickly add your site to a blacklist).

This solution also has the benefit of not feeding Google's ML efforts like Recaptcha would, or requiring you to set up Cloudflare, or inconvenience your users.

What are the downsides?


> Then put the comment into a review queue anyway.

> What are the downsides?

Unless you're a professional moderator that is paid for your moderation... time.

The primary thing we have a finite amount of....

No blogger with a blog post of substantial views is well served by a system that requires any moderation on their part at all.

Link to a thoughtful and dedicated moderation platform and let that community decide if your thoughts are worthy of sharing and discussing.

Saves everyone time.

Here's a thought that just struck me, let me try it out:

By not having a comment section you reduce your blogs filter bubble, because without knowing how people feel about your writing your blog post simply becomes a single entry in the aggregate "wisdom of crowds", once you engage a comment section you begin to locally meta cognate on what people think of your position and you end up with less original and diverse thought for the dedicated aggregators to surface.


That's not quite what I meant by "what are the downsides" - I was specifically referring to this system of proof-of-work-required-for-comment-submission, not comments in general.

I agree that moderation requires time, my question was if there are downsides of adding a proof-of-work system specifically relative to the same system without proof-of-work.


Maybe I'm in the minority here based on the comments I can see so far, but I really do value good comments on a blog when they come up.

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.


I have yet to implement this but I think a really good idea for blog comments is to link your blog post to a fediverse post. It has been posted here on HN several times already so you can google it but people have done this already.

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.


Also if you think this sounds neat and don't have a blog setup of choice already, writefreely is both easy to self-host and has public and free instances: https://writefreely.org/


They were a thing of the past shortly after they started. I remember back in my blogging days with Movable Type and I wrote an entry that angered A LOT of fans of a popular radio show host. It was impossible for me to keep up with the offensive and hateful comments they were leaving on literally every single post, so I ended up disabling the entire thing.

It didn't get much better with Blogger either. Now much of the time I see Facebook Comments embedded, or something like Disqus. Comment horror stories didn't help Digg much, if I recall correctly.

bots, spam, and uncontrollable political nonsense took most of them out. I don't think it's too weird. It takes a lot of the stress off of the blog owners, and to some extent, the responsibility.

Blogs weren't alone either.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-happened-after-7-news...


On Substack there are some blogs with extremely active comment sections.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com

https://doomberg.substack.com

https://dubnationhq.com

Are some examples.

Disclaimer: I work at Substack.


How are they moderated?


Substack only runs spam detection. The writers can delete comments on their blogs for any reason if they want to do so.


Yes they are a thing of the past. Whenever I run into them I smile for nostalgia and inevitably run into examples of why they are a thing of the past…

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


also forums were notorious for this, there was a program called xRumer or something that used to mass spam, solve captchas on blogs, forums to engage in short term SERP boosts and sell viagras.


I sometimes think someone has left that program running since back then because the spam comments I have seen - they all look the same from 15 years ago.


The following is my personal experience (so I can't comment on the general nature of blog comments).

I have a "strictly technical" SWE blog with approximately 4k to 8k users per month, which I have been maintaining it for 3/4 years.

I use Disqus for comments. I virtually have no spam (if I had some, it's been so little that I don't remember it). The comments are generally good quality (some even improved the articles), possibly due to the nature of the blog, but they're few.

If spamming and low quality comments are due to open comment systems, I'd still stick with a closed system like Disqus, as I prefer fewer but more motivated comments.

On a funny note, it took me a while to find out that Disqus introduced taboola ads at some point, because I use ad blockers. The moment I found out, I was so horrified that I thought somebody hacked the blog and panicked; it took me a bit to figure out what actually happened :)


If you don't mind sharing, how did you obtain that many users in such a short period?


Sure! I've actually though that it was a relatively small number :) I've reached 8k users around 1/1.5 years ago, so the times are even shorter.

I did not plan for exposure (audience size); however, looking at the stats, I think that there is a clear indication.

My articles are often more or less deep dives into mainstream topics; I believe that the consequences of this approach are two:

1. the articles get exposure because the topics are common, and frequently searched by developers;

2. by being deep dives, I think they slowsly get used as references and linked by other sites.

I think this is a specific approach with pros and cons.

The pros are that it slowly grows a good audience over the time, and that it tends to have a stable minimum (since the references are there). Also, repeated deep dives in a given field will get attention from known people working in it, which is very significant.

The downside is that this type of articles is a pain to write (and I'm not sure I'll continue).

I had at least one article that exploded in popularity, however, while that's nice to see, it's a type of article that doesn't provide any value in the long term (on the other hand, short term is also important; I got interviewed because of it).

I think the numbers are generally normal to reach if one focuses on at least one subject, and dives in it. My blog is intentionally very scattered - if I focused, say, on databases, I would have certainly multiplied the users, but that's not my end goal.

All the best! :) The blog is https://saveriomiroddi.github.io, by the way :)


I'd say it depends on content. I have comments on my wallpaper pages [0] and they are very useful and inspiring for me.

P.S. It is ironic that this very page is full of valuable comments :-)

[0]: https://vlad.studio/wallpaper/blue_and_yellow


I see a lot of people saying why not to have comments, and they are all fair things to say. But in counterpoint I'll say that sometimes I send a technical correction, or other such friendly remark, that I think the blogger gains by.

But of course I agree that the great majority of comments that you see are very discouraging.


Was thinking about it regarding "do it myself or use a third party eg. Discus" sure it's easy to drop but then it's not your data anymore... Also I would think you lose SEO for an async loaded thing like discus. The other issue is identity/cross platform. And abuse.


Disqus? Best first check this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033052


Man I'm doing it again spelling similar sounding words, I still get affect/effect and then/than straight though ha.

My 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.


Ad a user, I love comments. and the few I stumble upon are very often very helpful or insightful.

Either correcting something in the blog, or an update due to new software releases or alternatives that might work in other contexts. Etc.

Extremely helpful and very much appreciated.


Substack seems to have fostered a pretty good commenting environment for the little I've seen. Especially from authors like George Saunders writing non-political / education-focused "newsletters" (i.e., blogs). In part, this seems to be because of forced login, and the fact that you have a single, shared identity for all publications on the platform (thereby increasing the value of … civility?). But also, of course, the commenters are often limited to paying subscribers, so they are all on the "same team" as it were in a way public, completely open blogs / articles aren't.


I have a blog which has been running for a long time, and I allow comments on the most recent post, for about ten days, then close them off.

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/


There are a couple of blogs I read that get good comments, but most either do not or have the comments closed. The commonality between the few with good comments section is that the topic of the blog is relatively niche and the commentors tend to have deep subject matter knowledge.

It's worth noting one major exception to this pattern: Marginal Revolution (https://marginalrevolution.com/) is a very general blog, has a large readership, and still gets good comments on it (a lot of trolls too).


Hosting comments on a blog has a non-zero cost. There's infrastructure required to support them, security concerns, and then content concerns. For all the potential costs there is vanishingly little utility in self-hosted comments.

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.


For me, it's a time issue. I don't have time to moderate blog comments on my own blog, so I disabled comments.

Some people might post some really awesome comments, but a small percentage of people ruin the whole thing. So moderation is a necessity if you're going to allow comments. HN obviously allows comments, but it's because HN has dedicated moderators (thank you!).

Most people are not trolls. But there are enough trolls who pee in the pool that many pools have had to be closed.


I have Discord and Telegram groups for my blogs. I think most people that reach it bounce after seeing how loooong and hard to parse (at first glance) my posts are, but there's three or five people who AFAIK are reading me.

Ima just go ahead and spam it: https://asemic-horizon.com -- I don't think it's for the median HN dude/tte, but this forum is a meeting of diverse minds...


A few weeks ago, I removed the comment functionality of my decade old blog. Main reason: not much engagement and spam. If I post a link to my blog entries on reddit and HN, I get a lot more value. There are times when feedback directly on the post is useful. Maybe having a contact button with CAPTCHA is the way to go as a replacement for comment system.

EDIT: perhaps links to various discussion sites would also be useful.


Everyone here has been talking about how blog comments add little value. On many blogs they are right. But John D Cook's blog regularly has interesting comments, some of which he'll make posts addressing later. Maybe it's because he has a bigger blog or maybe it's something else but blog comments are capable of adding a lot of value.


handling bots is just not worth it. if there is a discussion happening on hackernews i usually add a link to the article. i also like the way lowtechmagazine handles comments but some could also argue that it builds an echo chamber if you are handling the moderation of your own content but that would also be happening on a normal blog.


Commenting hasn't just been pushed to twitter or ...email(?) -- it's been pushed here!

Yes, due to insane spam and bots and difficulty of managing/moderating, but I appreciate companies and bloggers close to this site/who are fans or at least frequent, including a thread link to their bigger posts here. CloudFlare sticks out


I used to like blog comments

But I now [mostly] hate them

And not just for the spam aspect (though it's a factor)

It's that comments are going to happen where they happen

And some platforms (reddit, hn, twitter, etc) are, quite frankly, better places than trying to selfishly centralize it all to my blog

The audience reach elsewhere is millions of times more than on my blog


I read blogs, usually blog posts about a specific remedy for a tech issue. The only reason for me to read/skim comments is if the suggested remedy or solution is no longer working and if somebody in the comments might have added their findings that do work. Else I have no reason to read any of the comments.


I really like https://utteranc.es/ for blogs, it requires a github account which seems a high enough bar, and has led to some very sparse but useful feedback.

edit - only option I tried, but there are alternatives linked in the comments here


The internet has become larger.

People's attention is more dispersed (additionally, several platforms are actively fighting for their attention by using all tricks in the book).

Hence the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped. The people who would leave thoughtful comments are busy with other things.

A few communities still stand (hacker news included).


I had one the most popular blogs in the hispanic sphere. I had to shutdown comments due, most of the blog posts had 0 participation, and I discovered discussion moved to other platforms, more suitable for discussion and free from the censorship of every blog author.

I also shutdown comments due lack of value, spam.


Not to “self promote” but I recently shared an article[0] detailing how I personally manage comments on my blog.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30206330


I just didn't like that I could write a neat article and someone would write comments that aren't too neat. Like even not capitalizing the first letter would bother me.


There's some left. The community at https://gothamist.com is a good example.


Comments Expectation = Great Conversations, Learning, Networking

Comments Reality = Bots, Spam, Strong opinions, showing off etc.

Enjoy writing. Great content will find its way out.


I keep comments on mine enabled, but the comment system is one i made myself and it is not enough trouble for spammers to bother to custom-spam it :)


In addition to a forum, I think blogs should have a built-in video chat, so that people can have real-time conversations about the posts.


My blog has comments and I have noticed the rate of comments per page view actually increasing over the last few years.

I have spam blockers though.


Perhaps a solution could be to make a Ttweet in association with the blog post, so comments can be made there?


I never allowed them in my 25 year old site. No time to deal with bots, moderation and other nonsense.


Nobody wants to see a "Be the first to comment" message at the end of a post.


I haven't seen anyone link it yet, so I will. Scott Alexander talks about why people shut down comment sections, as part of explaining why the CW (read: politics) thread on his subreddit got shut down:

> The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.

> But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...


Except for HN, which has dang's excellent moderation.

But HN is more of a meta-blog.


Comments are a thing of the past... People miss a place to "talk" like classical usenet so use and abuse any kind of "comment" and "social" tool for that, on the other side of the spectrum comments serve surveillance capitalism needs for profiling and insights.

If you want "comments" back you need to be back on usenet and when, perhaps out of a discussion, you decide to made an article instead of a post you just do it on your website (more than "blog", witch are effectively a thing of the past for other reasons) and post the relevant link a a new thread in a relevant ng. Comments happen there, a proper tool for the relative job :-)


Spam is killing the blog comments.


most of the substacks I subscribe to have excellent comment sections.


Blogs themselves seem to be on the way out. I hate that this is the case, but it's true.

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.


I would not say they are on the way out, but definitely out of the mainstream and growth is limited in this space. I would say the same is true of podcasts to a certain degree, with quick videos taking over this space.


This comment is irrelevant - nothing about "blogs" or "blog comments" requires (or excludes) anonymity.




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