Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

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...

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...

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.

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/

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.

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