Ask HN: Can email be a good UX for commenting on blogs?
For context, I hate signing up for stuff, and I don't really expect people to do that just to share their thoughts on a small blog.
Example flow: 1. User reads blog post and see/clicks button "email comment" 2. mailto link opens user's email client, with pre-populated template 3. Comment body + hash of sender address are relayed to me 4. I review the comment, potentially respond if needed, and eventually publish it 5. OPTIONAL: sender gets an automatic reply with a link to view/edit their comment, plus the ability to silence this thread or all threads when there are child comments to theirs.
I was inspired when I saw a professor's blog once, where he would literally just copy and paste emails into his blog posts as an improvised commenting system. I thought this was pretty cool because it's easy, it works, there's automatic moderation, and it also allowed conversations to go back and fourth, privately, before being published.
To me it seemed that a simple improvement would be to automate some parts by building an email relay to handle some of the manual aspects more conveniently.
A sketch of how it would work: comments written as emails would go to a computer somewhere that receives the message body, a hash of the sender's email, and any DMARC + SPF + ARC check statuses. Then that payload is packaged up and relayed to wherever one desires, per configuration or web hook or however you like to do it.
The email itself would need a way of associating the message body with the original blog post, as well as any parent comments that it's replying to. This could all be prepoulated in the payload of mailto link, e.g. paraphrasing a parent comment, url of the blog post in the subject, etc...
Some simple pros that I see are: 1. no sign-up required 2. bring your own client 3. some slight content moderation still possible 4. emails are naturally threaded, so responding is intuitive 5: emails also naturally emulate notifications, e.g. if someone replies to their comment
I would like to develop the idea further, but first I want to see what other people's thoughts are. Is this a BAD idea? Is a POST + verify email link a better flow? Thank you in advance for your thoughts.