Hacker News Reader

Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, finally I’ve found the time to buy a VPS and host a Jekyll blog with a nice comment system

Do we really need comment section on blogs? The blog comments are not particularly helpful to have any discussion at least not the way one can have here on HN, reddit, Twitter, etc,.

Besides the poor user interface, the users have to sign up to comment. Why would they sign up when they can have discussions on above platforms? If one does not implement sign up but allow users to comment just by entering username (like the way this blog did) then people start abusing the comment section.

I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow. I understand that this is terrible idea if reddit/hn chose to be walled gardens someday but then do we have other better solution?

View on HN

I couldn't disagree more. Comments have been a plus on every blog I've run. I've learned from my readers, been able to answer their questions and even become friends with a few of them.

The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is fundamentally at odds with the open web.

I do wish there was a way to just transfer ids better between systems. I don’t really want to b have users create an account every time but no good way to prevent spam. Maybe h-capcha but even that is cheap to spam.

As much as it pains me to mention it here, as I wholeheartedly do not support it for a number of important reasons, something like Metamask and an identity on a blockchain could work for this.

The more obvious solution is OAuth (or OpenID Connect), and there are plenty of providers that aren't Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, or GitHub.

Yeah I don’t really care about I’d but the problem is spam. Maybe phone text authentication is an alternative, idk how much that costs to implement though.

About 5c per msg, a bit lower for some countries, a bit higher for others.

Is there no service out there where you can just buy a number and use it for text validation

You could build one yourself by grabbing some hardware that includes a modem and grabbing a sim card from a local provider with "unlimited" text messages.

Might violate ToS though

Perhaps Mastodon could be a solution?

> The idea that every blog comment system should be run by a multi-billion dollar company like Facebook, Reddit or YC is fundamentally at odds with the open web.

Agree but don't you think there needs to be a better way at handling comments on web. What I do not want is:

1. sign up on every blog just to comment

2. something like discuss either

Maybe a federated comment section?

If you don't want to sign up, then just lurk!

I often go from just reading the posts to reading posts and comments to talking about the site elsewhere to signing up and just posting there.

Having used federated comment systems, they've been a complete loss. They increase page load times, lead to more low-quality drive-by comments and then inevitably eventually start trying to load their ads on my page.

The one exception is crypto sites, where people just log in with their wallet creds. Those are pseudonymous, shared across sites and have very frictionless UX. That would be a highly polarizing choice for a non-crypto-focused site, though.

It's the equivalent of sharing your bank account number with scammysitedotcom. Even if there are no security implications, sharing your entire financial history with any website is very privacy hostile.

Not necessarily. You should use a different account (preferably one with 0 transaction history, if no on-chain txes are needed) than your main financial account (and really, anyone not living paycheck to paycheck should have more than one of those in the first place. Cold/hot, have a separate one for any defi activities, use a new one for each L2, etc)

Just like you may not have the same email for job applications and dodgy e-commerce, or bring all your cash and cards with you in a purse to the nightclub.

(GP did say “shared across sites”, which should be a very deliberate decision and not the default. UX needs to improve to have better privacy by default. I could imagine Metamask defaulting to generating and connecting a unique address for each domain, requiring manually selecting accounts to have them shared)

Based on your comment, I'm guessing you've never used Metamask or similar before. You really should check it out and see just how trivial creating a new wallet is. HD wallets lend themselves to this kind of UX.

Got any links to such crypto sites where they’re used for auth for comments and social? It’s something I’ve been theorizing for years, would be great to see in the wild.

https://bitclout.com

Cheers. It looks like it directly answers my question but not quite what I had in mind (pushes for linking Google account and email; requires phone number verification for the "free" signup airdrop to get the platform-specific coins required to participate; frankly looks quite sketchy and faux-decentralized)

Oh, interesting. I never linked mine to Google or a phone. Maybe they changed the requirements for airdropping later on.

It's not that centralized though. I know of multiple projects that ran custom nodes of it for their own front-ends / customizations of the network. That's something that you just couldn't do with Twitter.

The project did seem a bit like a quick cash grab though, and I'm not sure it will ever return to the peak it hit last spring.

Comment based systems built on top of existing platforms such as Matrix may be interesting.

For want of a better word there's a "misconception" that the Matrix protocol can only be used for chat apps, but instead it's defined a fully open, federated and encrypted event transmission service which can be used for any type of multiuser application.

100% THIS! I believe (hope!) that as more people understand that the matrix protocol is *not only* a chat protocol, but far more than that, then we will see many more different ideas flourish. There are already ideas for leveraging matrix for a blog...so why not for commenting, and other scenarios?

This is already implemented https://cactus.chat/

Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26371813

The holy grail the Internet has been looking for since the Web was launched is a single-sign-on that doesn't suck in some fundamental way. It is definitely a huge friction point for commenting on a random blog that you might only visit one time.

I totally agree that you shouldn't outsource your blog comments to someone else though, because what happens when Facebook decides their commenting system isn't profitable anymore and kills the product? Half the content on your web site suddenly vanishes.

This is a lot of what OpenID was designed for; use an identity managed by your site or someone you trust to sign in and own comments elsewhere.

> Maybe a federated comment section?

I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles? Make in-line annotations and share them? See my friends’ annotations as I read articles? Etc.

This could be a browser plug-in or perhaps an iframe over the original content. It could even be implemented as a protocol that browsers support (“go to your configured overlay server(s) and load content for the page you are on”) if it were successful enough. This sort of feature gets better the more streamlined and “baked in” it is.

> > "Maybe a federated comment section?"

> "I’d love to see this. For a long time I’ve been wishing for some sort of social overlay on top of the web - why can’t I comment with my community on existing articles?"

that's what disqus wanted to be, and we've largely rejected that because of the privacy and anonymity issues with disqus.

a year and a half ago, i did a bit of a dive into webmentions[0] and bridgy[1] as a federated alternative, but that doesn't seem to have taken off yet.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/webmention [1]: https://brid.gy/

ActivityPub would work well for this, as there are several implementations of the standard, it can be self-hosted, and is already used in the comment sections of some video sites. I wonder if someone has already written an HTML embed that does this exact thing for arbitrary sites...

> that's what disqus wanted to be

I see what you mean, but perhaps the key difference I see is that if this is a federated protocol, then you bring your own identity network (for example, someone in another sub-thread mentioned that Matrix could support this usecase). Presumably FB would implement this protocol if it was popular enough, and replicate FB comments, but the cipherpunks could use a Matrix server or whatever privacy-preserving method they prefer. By promoting it to the level of a protocol you can get multiple implementations/networks, but without forcing the communities to be un-discoverable to each other. (E.g. I might be fine with everybody seeing my public post, but prefer not to have every website capture my Disqus ID by virtue of me viewing the page. A bridged privately-run overlay could meet that requirement.)

> webmentions[0] and bridgy[1]

Perfect, thanks - that looks like at least the next evolutionary step towards what I'm envisioning.

I think that until native browser-support is added (if it ever gets there), bridging posts back to "non-protocol-speakers" by posting comments to the blog itself is probably the smart move. That way you don't split your community. But I'd love to see a world where the comments and content are disaggregated, so that I can just filter out the garbage "public" comments, or participate in them, depending on my mood.

Yeah because such a system should be a standardized layer of the web not something controlled by a single company. The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government. I’ve long thought that social security numbers will end up as a predecessor to this as the government is already the one entity that knows everything about us (and you could still have private browsing that didn’t use this layer.)

> The underlying authentication should probably be stored on a distributed ledger or set by the government.

I'm sure authoritarian governments would love this setup, but don't think rights activists or dissidents would.

You can use Mastodon for comments on static sites with a bit of javascript.

https://joelchrono12.netlify.app/blog/how-to-add-mastodon-co...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570268

What is wrong with discuss? Seems like exactly what you're asking for.

I comment on some blogs where I just need to enter an username, optionally my mail address and no account creation required at all.

I don’t know how those blogs manage spam but there is just none. So it’s totally doable.

An option I see is to just store a random token in a cookie and require pre-publish moderation for the first n posts from this token.

Your regular commenters are probably just using the same 1 or 2 devices to read your blog.

Back when blogs were a thing, my solution was to require all comments to be PGP signed. No spam, and the people commenting on my blog all liked that sort of thing, so it worked quite well.

The software still exists: https://github.com/jrockway/angerwhale ("last commit: 15 years ago". holy shit.)

> What I do not want is:

> 1. sign up on every blog just to comment

> 2. something like discuss either

So, you want the blog commenting system we already have? It's not common for a blog to require an account before you can comment.

indeed – you might locally mirror comments from other webmention/activitypub etc. places and black/whitelist as usual.

I post on various blogs with no sign-in. It's the usual wordpress comment thing where it asks for an email address but blatantly fake ones work. Typically the post goes into moderation the first few times you use a given email, then is auto approved. Federation otoh involves a centralized service which I'd rather avoid.

for many blogs a high barrier to entry to comments is a priceless feature.

A mailto: link provides most of the advantages of the comments: a way to report errors, suggestions, ask questions and even get to know each other.

And it uses the most popular federated protocol, so most users won't have to create a n ew account.

Also spam is not a problem, comments stay private.

My old blogs all had an email address on them as well as comments. Some people did email me and it was useful, but far more preferred to comment because they wanted to share their thoughts publicly.

It's probably why you wrote this comment rather than just emailing someone.

My favorite way to do this is to encourage people to email me their comments. If anyone has something to add to the discussion I may ask for permission to quote them in a "Responses" sections, or more often, if they write their own post I'll link to it.

Why do this? Well, for one, it gives me absolutely quality control over my website. I am the final arbiter of what I want to present and how I want to present it.

But this also changes the shape of the comments; it is not a public remark into the void, it is a letter to the author. I've been amazed and the quality and thoughtfulness in some of these notes.

And this is why websites like HN exist, and why people use them to discover new blogs :)

A lot of times I am reading something, and think: "That's a dangerous advice! Don't do this unless you really have to!" If I post this as HN comment, I will get somr responses, maybe confirming my point, or perhaphs saying that I am wrong and that original advice was good after all. And either way, future readers will be able to read whole discussion and make their own judgement.

But if the author asks people to email, I will not bother. Unless my arguments are so good as to convince original author, they will just "disappear" - no one else will read them or respond to them.

> I think HN/Reddit comment section should be used for discussions although I would prefer if it could be embedded in blog somehow.

I've thought of this as well, but then I read on the HN Guidelines that: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0]

So unless every post you have complies with HN Guidelines, I don't think we'll ever see this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All the rules say is you should not submit your own blog posts yourself. But if someone else submits it, you are welcome to link to it, and perhaps even embed (I think there is an API to access HN data?)

I can imagine a "smart" blog which periodcally checks HN if the post has been submitted (or maybe verifiers visitors' Refere headers?) If no submission is found, the "comments" link points to HN submission page. If yes, the "comments" link points to existing discussion.

I don't think the rules actually say you should not submit your own blogs posts.

"Do we really need comment section on blogs?"

I used to write a blog and the comments that readers posted were always a valuable part of the blog. Comments don't require sign-up depending on the settings of your blog (mine did not require sign-up).

Blogs without the ability to post comments are often static site blog generators - one of the reasons why I don't use them. (I don't consider embedding Disqus a suitable option for comments - a unpleasant experience for readers.)

A frequent occurrence: a blog has no commenting ability and instead the blog author encourages readers to discuss their blog entry on Twitter(?!), or Hacker News or some other discussion forum. For some authors discussion is not very important - it's more about sharing the story to as many sites as possible. I can understand that, but I hope comments remain an important part of many blogs.

Yes we need it because on some posts, like a tutorial, can be useful ask to the original poster some infos.

You don’t have to sign up, I disabled it, you can also make an anonymous comment.

PS: if we don’t need the comments, then why you commented here? :-)

> PS: if we don’t need the comments, then why you commented here? :-)

I never said we don't need comments. We probably do not need it on blog.

> You don’t have to sign up, I disabled it, you can also make an anonymous comment.

As I mentioned in my comment the disadvantage of that is people abuse it.

> I never said we don't need comments. We probably do not need it on blog.

But my blog has some tutorials, people may want to ask me something, if we don't talk on a personal blog self-hosted, we have to rely on some centralized platforms/socials. There are already lots of them!

>As I mentioned in my comment the disadvantage of that is people abuse it.

If someone (you) write "penis" in other languages, I can delete (as I've done) it. There's a spam filter for these stupid things, but I hope people are a bit more adults than who write "penis" in Indian on someone's blog! =)

HN and Reddit are already walled gardens today, in the sense that they are in no way federated with other sites, and they both reserve the right to delete content at any point. There isn't much different between a blog that links to a Facebook post asking people to "discuss this post on Facebook" than doing the same with HN or Reddit.

Hard disagree.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid Facebook specfically - tracking across the web, real name policy, per-user algorithmic feed, selling info, and many other things. None of them apply to HN, and I am pretty sure most of them don't apply to reddit either.

I agree that having comment sections on blogs can be problematic. Nobody wants to make an account on a random blog site just to make a comment, and you need explicit accounts to stop spam. Comment histories are also nice to have.

There's an interesting middle ground in this space called Cactus Comments [0]. They're part of the Matrix ecosystem. The idea is to create a Matrix "room" for every post so that anyone with a Matrix account can comment in that room. Then, at the bottom of the post there's a preview of the most recent messages in the room, along with (optionally) a text box for anonymous comments.

Admittedly, setting this up to be self-hosted is pretty involved, especially if you're not already with Matrix. But the Cactus people make it easy to get started with their (free) public servers.

[0]: https://cactus.chat/demo/

I agree completely. I disable all comments on my blogs and if people want to discuss then Twitter or Reddit seem to make much more sense.

Otherwise you end up spending a ton of time just removing spam, never mind trying to make sense of and respond to the comments that may get randomly left years after the original post.

Disqus not good enough? Or Kismet (WordPress)?

I think so that way people stumbling on it etc can give feedback to the writer. I often will hit some technical blog that mostly answers my question and then someone in the comments will correct the author or even ask a question that further expands on what the blog post is about.

I dis/agree in parts - esp. when it comes to response times.

I love having comments, but I have them with a delay. This way they can well loop back, say 2x a day, to a static blog.

And: the comments are seperate from the article in an iframe, see e.g. https://blog.mro.name/2009/08/nsdateformatter-http-header/#c...

In all these other platforms, he is not the moderator of the comments. They can be censored or removed, and one of those corporations can decide that now you are not allowed to have that opinion anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com