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Comment by throw14082020 | Hacker News Reader

throw14082020

The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced.

I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.

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I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue - so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive.

On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?

A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!".

"Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy invasion and refuse to pay for stuff.

[0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-...

I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle.

I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts.

I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.

So it depends a bit on what you are hosting, but a real concern for myself at least is the value that free users bring to your service.

I'm not talking about the costs of running your service to support them, but everything else. A part of your free userbase will expect the world for free and start demanding more, and as they outnumber your paid users by so much it can just be a huge distraction. The question is how many of these free users will convert to paying users?

I personally add a free tier to my products because I want to make the tool accessible to hobby and other small projects without a budget, but it's probably not a good business decision.

Something I've been considering: charge some small one-time payment, say $10, for a lifetime 'try-out' plan. Then when they want to upgrade to a subscription you give them that $10 as a discount for their subscription. It may filter those users that will never upgrade anyway.

Check out the pay-want-you-can model.

"Free" can't indeed be put back in its cage, but this would also apply to real-life, and yet the majority of people don't go out stealing/robbing people even though it would technically allow them to get goods for free that they otherwise would need to pay for.

The problem isn't advertising in itself. The problem is that the law hasn't caught up (or doesn't want to catch up, thanks to corruption/lobbying by vested interests) with cracking down on large-scale non-consensual data collection (which we used to call spyware).

Ads are fine. The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough and the advertising/data collection industry is engaging in unethical and potentially illegal practices of large-scale stalking (without informed consent) to try and get extra money.

> "The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough..."

ads pay plenty, just look at the size of google and facebook (granted, they've together largely consolidated the online advertising market, but it's still huge). greed is the simpler answer here.

> We'll pay for hosting

Will we? Most personal websites i know of, including my own, fit perfectly within the free tiers of Netlify/Vercel/Firebase/S3+CloudFront/GitHub Pages/etc.

The cost of a commenting system is not in hosting, it’s in moderation.

And that cost falls squarely on the site owner not the comment service. Moderation may be as expensive or as cheap as you make it.

Big Tech is spending a lot of money on it, thousands of people and jobs and algorithms.

If you ask me, it's a fools errand and I hope that they waste their money trying to build a clean Internet.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

I don’t know the rules for Disqus but I expect that they impose at least some limits to block bots and spam, which is almost impossible to achieve for a small site.

Check out akismet, it works for wordpress and is likely all you need to divide spam from ham during moderation.

> It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?

1. Too many separate subscriptions become hard to manage. Example: the banks in my country don't allow direct access of my account movements to any budgeting apps so I have to tally everything manually because I want to track my expenses. There is a business idea here somewhere: a subscription aggregator or some such, where you can manage a total subscription budget per month and be able to cut a service easily (which is of course strongly against the interests of those you subscribed to).

2. Cynicism. I have physically met and conversed with people working in ad-tech. They have zero scruples. If you pay for a service these people will laugh at you, collect your money and then proceed to inject trackers and huge banners in the website/app with no regard that you paid for the service. You don't magically disappear from tracking once you pay. That's sadly a myth. Your narrative is correct on its surface but it was perverted and abused.

---

I agree that the free tier services is like running a charity and not everyone feels like they have to. There is a business opportunity for a better model of free trials and NOT to automatically subscribe you after a week or a month. Whether that new model is in the financial interest of the gatekeepers (Apple / Google and the apps in their stores) is another discussion entirely, though.

---

Finally, I am OK paying a few more bucks a month to my ISP. So let all those services figure out a way to charge the ISPs. I'll gladly pay anywhere from $5 to $50 extra a month for everything that I consumed that is viewed as non-free.

Paypal can manage subscriptions and cut them off just don't expect them to give your money back in a timely fashion. I got ripped off by the New York Times glitchy interactions and it took months to give some of the money back.

Yes, that's the problem right there -- incredible amount of dark patterns when you just want to unsub. This puts me off and I skipped a good amount of subs to popular services because of these horror stories.

That, plus PayPal is ripping you off with currency conversions.

The problem is majority doesn't care about tracking regardless of free or paid. And the MBAs will push for as hard monetization as possible.

True. Hence at one point we all have to own the problem and start standing behind our ideals.

>On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff.

Not only for that. Also because they can make extra money off of it.

So no reason to not have "shady, dark pattern, privacy killers" even to services your customers pay for.

It's because of a focus on quality and responsibility that you don't do it, not because "we already make money since our service is non-free, so let's leave the extra ad money on the table".

It's more fulfilling to offer the service for free than to have a handful of paying customers and watch the world fall into a monopoly of moderation by Big Tech.

My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried to sell it to people.

Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....

Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments.

Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". I picture that last one coming from the "engineers" who build those hazardous off-the-line chargers you see at gas station check out counters.

Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.

The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...

Just yesterday I went though a Kubernetes tutorial and hung up on one step, others in the comments did as well. Very useful.

Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different debugging approaches.

I've ran a blog that was quite popular within the torrent community. The comment section itself was a reason to visit the blog. If you have an active community or you want to build an active community comments are a must.

Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable.

If your blog is just so you can write what you currently think about things then there is little value.

You can accomplish the same with a mailing list. Users don't even need to create an account; they just click the "mailto:" link at the bottom of your article and type their comment in their preferred client. They can browse the archives for a threaded discussion.

That being said, the best comment platform for a blog is, imo, someone else's blog. If you want to leave a comment, write your own (micro)blog post and send a Webmention.

I wrote about this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26043298

I want people's feedback and questions. I want that feedback, questions, and their answers, to be public. Email is private which means if one person asks a question my answer has to be repeated for each person. As comments on the blog others can read the the feedback and responses.

As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus. (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to disqus. I will keep on using them.

>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.

The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there.

That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.

Yes, but then your community becomes subject to the whims of Twitter/Reddit/etc.

I've been feeling it these days, helping my spouse with their art career.

You make a good point I should have added. Outsource the community to an external platform and let someone else handle the comments, spam, moderation, etc.

> I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments.

I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments.

I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely happen.

I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed. It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content.

I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500 comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker). The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks, worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks asking for tech support because it didn't work for them. Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker directly.

I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate, keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in between.

I can help you import your users and comments into Remarkbox if you like to move your community.

Thanks a lot for the offer but I think I'm going to decline for now. It's nothing personal or even related to your comment service specifically.

For the sake of transparency here's the questions going through my mind and how I arrived at this decision based on using the free version of Disqus:

- A lot of people have a Disqus account and having a low barrier of entry to comment is important. When most folks don't need to create an account, that's kind of nice.

- Disqus has been around for a really long time and has handled billions of comments. This gives me confidence the service isn't going to be down for maintenance regularly, or just break one day.

- Disqus has a pretty good spam filter due to having so much volume. I would rather not be bothered by having to do manual spam moderation regularly and if I hooked up a 3rd party service to do that I would end up either having to pay for that, or you're still allowing another company to profit from your data.

- Disqus makes it pretty easy to moderate comments. You get notified of a new comment by email, click it, and then hit a drop down and figure out how you want to moderate it.

- Most developers are using some form of ad-blocker so Disqus' invasive ads are stopped. Although Disqus can still read the contents of the comments and profit from them in other ways (improve services around paid offerings, maybe selling the data to other companies doing ML around written text, etc.).

To be fair this is also why I haven't picked any semi-popular open source self hosted comment solutions. I wouldn't mind self hosting it alongside my blog on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server, but all of my objections apply to this as well. And now there's also the added risk of the code having security vulnerabilities that could potentially expose my server or even worse leak personal data from the people who have commented, such as their email address.

I could write the code myself which I've thought about for a while too, but the spam problem is still there. There's also allocating all of the time necessary to implement such a thing in a production ready way. When really all I want to do is create new blog posts / videos and have a way for folks to contribute to the conversation in a persisted way.

Cool. Thanks for the feedback.

Most of the objections have been solved with Remarkbox. Users do not need an account to comment. We email you when new comments happens you can control how often by modifying your notification settings (immediately, daily, weekly digests)

The population of people with ad blockers is low, for example I'm a tech person but I do not use ad-blockers.

I hope you reconsider, I'd offer you white glove support to move.

As for spam it's not much of an issue on Remarkbox, but if it becomes a problem akismet will be integrated so you can apply your own API keys. This will filter the likely spam from the likely ham.

Have a great day!

No problem. Here's a few follow up questions that aren't listed in your FAQ if you don't mind answering them. Maybe some of them can become FAQ items later.

What do you do to combat spam and what does the work flow look like to moderate it?

Is it possible to change the word "remark" to "reply" as an end user?

What does the work flow look like for users to edit their posts? Can they edit them forever or is it time locked sort of like HN's comments?

If a user deletes a reply, do all of the child replies get deleted or does the original parent reply that was deleted get renamed to "deleted" while keeping children replies in tact?

Is there a way to restrict users from posting links unless they have an account or are pre-approved? Do you mark those links as nofollow, ugc or something else?

Can you disable certain things like image tags so users can't embed images or other media (video, iframes, etc.)?

Is there a way to black list specific user names from being registered?

Can unverified users edit or delete their own messages? If so, how does that work?

If an unverified person creates an account later on, will their original unverified comments get changed to their new username?

Are registered user names from verified users protected from ever being used again?

How long are users verified for after using the magic link? What does the user experience look like for verified users who end up being logged out?

What would the migration process look like from Disqus to Remarkbox? Disqus doesn't give site owners the email addresses of users, which makes me think I would end up losing who posted what for thousands of comments since they would all be classified as "unverified" comments?

For posts with hundreds of comments, is there pagination or a load more feature?

Is it possible to lazy load the comments based on the scroll position of the device viewing the site? For example, your iframe isn't loaded until it's close to being visible? If so, is this an option you can turn on and off?

Is it possible to customize the date output of comments? I noticed it outputs dates like 8y, 213d ago which in my opinion is a bit unnatural.

Is there a way to customize the "link" functionality? Right now after clicking it, there's a jarring user experience where it auto-scrolls the page. I'm not sure what the intent of this is. Is it to prepare for a user to manually copy the link? Could that be replaced with a copy link to clipboard?

Have you given any thought on making a specific comment's date output the permalink href instead of the user name? I clicked a user name thinking it would show me a list of their comments but it was really their specific comment. I know you can click the avatar but it's really confusing because clicking a user name everywhere else would typically bring you to a user's profile, not the specific thing they created.

If a user verifies an account on site A, will they already be verified on site B? If so, is there a way to disable the link to show a user's comments since it would now be listing their comments from other sites.

From what region of the world do you host the embed link and serve the iframe from? Is there a CDN in front of it?

Can you get the count of comments near the remark comment box itself? When viewing a post that has a Disqus embed you can output the comment count above it. It's basically a part of the widget. That's a nice number to have.

Do you have a list of sites using Remarkbox that aren't your own sites?

The preview functionality is a bit wobbly, it jumps around a lot based on what you're typing. For example if I put a, b, c, d on 4 different lines it takes almost a full second for it to jump to 1 line since it's Markdown. Is there an option to make single line breaks be treated as <br> new lines so it's a bit more WYSIWYG?

Do you have a public status page showing the uptime of your platform?

Edit:

I hope you don't mind the suggestions. I'm not trying to come off as one of those users who expect the world for nothing.

Just letting you know that personally some of these things are barriers that would prevent me from switching over and I like what you're trying to do, so I'm more than happy to take the time out to list them out.

If they get implemented, that's cool but if not no worries.

Hey we've been talking over email, the plan is to answer these questions at https://faq.remarkbox.com

While I agree Disqus solves a lot problem as a comment system.

They certainly harvest visitor's data. There are many privacy-friendly comment systems as well as a 3rd party anti-spam service like OOPSpam that do not collect user data. It all boils down to the fact what is your local law says about privacy, and how much you care about your vistiors' privacy.

> There are many privacy-friendly comment systems as well as a 3rd party anti-spam service like OOPSpam that do not collect user data.

If there were a free fully managed comment system that you could embed onto a site that guaranteed user's privacy, didn't track anything, had billions of comments pumped through it to ensure it's technically adequate and they had multiple years of a good track record for reliability along with a spam filter that blocks 99% of spam hands free I would instantly switch. But I don't think any type of solution like this exists.

Just using OOPSpam alone comes with a $17 / month fee and based on its FAQ it looks like you need to call its API which means it wouldn't work with a static site like Disqus does because OOPSpam requires making an API call from a server with a secret key.

>Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them?

Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues?

>Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post".

That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not true for other kinds of blogs.

>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.

That doesn't foster a community of discussion.

See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.

Try remark42. Free, open source.

But self-host only, unless there's also a free remark42-as-a-Service?

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