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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

The slowness and chattiness of Disqus were the first things I noticed about it too. I'm disappointed that a YC company is resorting to that.

I ended up using Reddit for blog comments:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/29.html

Reddit has:

1) a good commenting interface

2) many existing users with accounts

3) a low barrier to a signup for those who don't (you barely even need an e-mail address)

4) an API

The downside right now is that you have to leave the page to comment, but I don't think it's a big deal. It probably lowers engagement a little, but I find that the most commens happen on other aggregators like HN, no matter which service you use for comments.

I also use reddit's RSS feeds, since a few people asked for that.

Reddit has its share of immature users and a culture of snark, but my subreddit has managed to steer clear of that.

View on HN

There is another big (in my eyes) downside to using Reddit for such purpose: Reddit threads are automatically archived after six months, at which point no new comments can be added to them. Of course nothing stops a user from creating a fresh thread, but that leads to fragmentation of comments and if you want to somehow mitigate this, it introduces additional effort.

> Reddit threads are automatically archived after six months, at which point no new comments can be added to them.

Some people intentionally do this to the comments on their old posts, to avoid having to monitor them for spam and abuse.

That also eliminates monitoring them for valuable contributions, especially on evergreen content.

You can always make a new thread, treating reddit as a normal forum.

Too much work

Disqus was a lot better before they spent a bunch of time and money building out live updates. Does anyone actually like that feature? Having posts move down the screen at random intervals as you're trying to read them is incredibly frustrating. Every time I have to click "pause live updates" I wonder why not just turn that off for good.

Me to. Having clicked that like 50 times a turn off permenantly option would be cool.

I'm using Facebook comments for a new project I'm starting, but I would really prefer to be using reddit. Has anyone seen a way to embed reddit comments onto a web page that isn't too hacky? -iframes, etc. I have a subreddit created for my site already, but I really don't want to just link to the discussion pages like you're doing.

I could have sworn I had seen a few articles a couple of years back saying reddit was getting into the embedded comments game like Facebook and Disqus, but I haven't seen them around anywhere.

Reddit dev here. I made one of our current oembeds. I have thought for a while that it would be neat to offer one for a subreddits top posts. A comment tree embed would be cool too. I don't know if mods would be fans of it letting users add comments from it though.

Maybe I'll play with this during our company hackathon next week.

I wish Reddit would embrace commenting and could compete with Disqus. I think bloggers especially have more trust in reddit, if would work fast and doesn't load a lot of crap like disqus it would bring a good chunk of new users to reddit and also be beneficial to bloggers themselves.

I can see this creating more headaches for moderators. It's already difficult enough to get people to read the rules before posting.

I imagine embeds would be enabled/disabled per subreddit so mods wouldn't have to deal with it if they didn't want to. A blog that wants to add comments from Reddit would start their own subreddit.

Auto mod. Headaches for mods don't exist because it's just a website and not a job.

As a former moderator of a default subreddit, I don't think you know what you're talking about here. AutoMod is a useful tool but can only implement basic rules—it's more a supplement to human moderators. And people of course care about things that aren't their jobs.

I think it's possible to write something using the Reddit API, but I didn't look into it:

https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/

If it's a new project, I wouldn't worry about the extra click until you start getting some comments (yeah I realize it's a bit circular, but true). My experience is that you will get comments from the aggreggators that the traffic came from, e.g. HN. And maybe Twitter and Facebook.

Most people aren't used to posting comments on websites anymore. But I do get a few comments on Reddit, and it has been worth it.

Is there any risk of a subreddit getting banned by the spam filter because all posts link to a single domain?

Nope, you are free to do whatever with your own subreddit, e.g.:

https://www.reddit.com/r/oilshell/

It's actually still against the rules

> Even in your own subreddit, just submitting links to your own site/stuff can get you banned [0]

It's what leads to people getting shadow banned and not understanding why

[0]https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion#wiki_can_i_just_ru...

I don't think so. There are subreddit (ab)used for even sillier thing than that: see RedditStorage[1] for example.

[1]: https://github.com/rossem/RedditStorage

Disqus has an API too. That's probably the easiest way to remove their JS from your website.

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