Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

I find the notion of using a third-party service for commenting a bit ridiculous. The commenting system and the way it works is an essential part of building a community around a website; treating it like a commodity is just wrong.

The way your comment system works is part of what defines your site, and if that part is not under your control, you'll be just an average website with an average community.

Think of all the VB/phpBB/IPB powered forums.

Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

For the same reason, I never use a CMS. If I want to build a website, I will build it from scratch. CMS powered sites tend to all look a like, you can often tell right away when a site is using a certain CMS; by the lack of polish in its design and the familiar menu to the left, or the familiar urls, or the familiar clutter and noise that always accompany sites powered by X (where X is some CMS).

Tumblr does a good job of providing high quality designs, so your tumblr blog will always look polished and professional. But it will also look like the other thousand blogs that use the same theme you're using. You can make your own theme, but if you're a control freak, you'll soon run into walls where there are certain things you want to do with your blog but you just can't.

I completely disagree, and I'm getting a big "Not Invented Here" vibe.

Disqus comments are excellent. They handle comment threading, email notifications, voting, login (with your choice of about 5 providers), moderation, spam control... the list goes on and on.

Disqus manages all this while making everything look good.

I use disqus on my blog, because I've got better things to do than reinvent the wheel, especially when there's some extremely polished commodity wheels. It would take me months to implement all the functionality disqus gives me for free.

>Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

Depends on the focus of the site. Fact is, packages like VBulletin are very good at what they do, and I find I generally have a more pleasant experience on VB/phpBB powered sites that behave like other forums I visit than I do on sites that try to reinvent the wheel and end up lacking basic functionality just to be different.

Absolutely. I see no problem outsourcing functional components of your website- granted, the product you outsource to had better be good.

There are many things I disagree with in your comment.

Firstly, TechCrunch is not primarily about the TechCrunch community. It's unlike Hacker News in that way. Hacker News exists to talk about interesting articles; TechCrunch is a newspaper - it exists to write them. So for them, commenting is a commodity.

Secondly, I think your views on CMSs are a very bad strategy (a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, which is bad). They're also wrong - I don't think CMSs looks are generic at all. At least not with a decent CMS, which you can theme. Wordpress, for example, can be made to look completely different from one site to the next.

Lastly, I think you're missing the obvious tradeoff involved. Sure, you're more limited by creating a site using a CMS, but then it's also a lot harder.

You must find a balance though. I would prefer a canned comment solution with good discussion over a unique and hand coded comment system, with flame wars and trolling any day. As for using a cms, it really depends on what cms you use I suppose. Coming from a wordpress background, I can say I am often surprised as to what sites are using wordpress in what ways. While some CMS's restrain you to certain looks etc, (if only due to difficulty of customization) others allow you almost infinite customization. As for Tumblr, the rigid theme guideline and review process, the small (when compared to competing products) selection of themes, and the resulting quality of the themes are part of their unique and yet similar ecosystem and it is part of their image, whether its for the best or not, it seems to be working for them.

I think that's true, at least where the content of the discussion takes a back seat to the bells & whistles.

"Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site"."

Load up TechCrunch's homepage with Firebug open and behold the horrors it holds. It is, by far, the most cringe-inducing contemporary site, and it's the single worst example to demonstrate Firefox being brought to a crawl (Chrome deals with its freak show more elegantly).

They may cover technology, but their site shows little technical competence.

To be fair, a good percentage of the issue is the viral spread of page contaminating twitter and facebook junk.

The big selling point for Disqus is the back-end management system. Disqus is AWESOME at managing your commenters, killing spam and the like. If comments are not your core competency (e.g. Digg or Reddit or HN) then Disqus is a very attractive option.

So if there's anyone from Disqus monitoring this thread. I was wondering what this meant and how it compared to the features that wordpress/akismet offers and couldn't find a spot on the disqus site where it's really clearly defined.

So that being said, can you explain why this would be better then the tools something like wordpress offers?

Disqus handles spam well but anti-spam isn't the sole or even primarily purpose. If that's what you're looking for, Akismet is a good choice.

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