Hacker News Reader

Comment by mzzter | Hacker News Reader

Half the value of Disqus is that it hosts the server API for you. Any viable alternative to disqus or other commenting engine needs to provide hosting too. Otherwise, it's not useful out of the box for static websites and blogs using shared hosting. The challenge is integrating comments without the ability to control the dynamic server backend.

View on HN

The other half value of Disqus is to provide comments to static sites. Back in the days, most sites used dynamic content, and had comments as part of the CMS system they used. Today, lots of sites have no back-end database, and unfortunately, lots of such sites use Disqus simply for convenience. Convenience that hurt the sites, and their visitors (slow load time, unacceptable tracking & spying). Any alternative should be welcomed.

If the sites that use Disqus today were willing to pay for an alternative, I would personally offer hosting of such, with fast load times and no tracking. However, I don't believe such willingness exists, and people are getting conditioned to accept sluggish load times and tracking. Too bad. Self hosted Open Source solutions are the second best alternative - management gets the illusion that the thing is free, and you actually get fast load times and no tracking.

For context, the "load times" we're talking about in the context of Disqus, at least the ones given in the articles I've read, is about 3 seconds. What's more, the javascript is below the fold, so you've already read the site content before seeing the unloaded comment section anyways.

I find it very hard to get worked up about 200k and 3 seconds of nonblocking load.

The tracking is of more immediate concern, but you also have to make a choice as a site owner:

1. Host your own comments. Nobody does this anymore because nobody likes registering for every site out there. You can have anonymous commenting, but ++ abuse. Either way, spam concerns are completely on your shoulders, and you still have to moderate.

2. Shell out to Disqus or similar. People get to log in with the credentials they already have (and don't have to log in at all if they have cookies from using another Disqus site), moderation is still a thing, but spam is much less of a problem.

3. Not have comments at all. An increasingly popular option.

> 3 seconds of nonblocking load.

That's a lot. Because Disqus doesn't generally load when the page does.

You have the time the user is reading to load it, but generally Disqus doesn't load till it comes into view.

With so much going on about instant articles (or whatever FB calls them), and some institutions pausing, and thinking if its worth handing over their content (often for free) to these external entities - whose goals may/may not be in alignment, I make a prediction:

* In 5 years time, large organizations (e.g. NY Times) will look far more into self-hosted, often open sourced alternatives. Maybe now, they post to twitter, soon they'll refer users to their own mastodon instance. Now, orgs host comments on disqus, in the future self-hosted platforms like Commento will be used. In some ways, it will go back to the independent way in which things operated back in the late 90s/early 2000s; though hopefully better in other ways. That's my prediction.

I really hope you are right :)

For static sites, a service that takes comments and pushes them to the source repo for the site (or an extra comment-only repo for security and build-performance) could also be interesting.

On the one hand, it could be nice to have it all in a repository or two.

On the other hand, a repo history is normally immutable (with force pushes on rare occasions), and comment spam is way to common. Do you really a repo with all the usual link spam in its commit history? In case of public hosting it may trigger some spam filtering automation and block the repo/account. While perfectly possible, I'm not sure a DVCS repository is a well-matching concept for storage here.

https://staticman.net/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com