Hacker News Reader

Comment by damnstraight | Hacker News Reader

You lose virtually nothing if you just block Disqus wholesale with an ad blocker. I'll admit it's quite nice for replying to comments on blogs, but there's no reason that a) needs to happen in a public comment and b) that you cannot provide an email for people to reach you at. In any case, almost all the good conversation is in a secondary place—reddit, hacker news, social media.

I'm far more likely to send you an email than I am to sign into an unaffiliated third party and trust their cookies.

View on HN

>You lose virtually nothing if you just block Disqus wholesale with an ad blocker.

Unfortunately, that's not true for the blogs I read.

I used to block Disqus because (#1) it loads slowly, and (#2) it is a memory hog (Disqus' javascript code always has a memory leak in both Firefox and Chrome)

However, I ended up missing out on critical information that readers left in the Disqus comments. For example, if a blogger might review a power tool and a commenter might ask "what's that accessory you're attaching to it?", the blogger will then reply with the answer and may attach a link to the product in Disqus.

Similar situation with programming blog. Some followup Disqus comment may have a correction of syntax, etc.

(I wish people would stop leaving useful information in Disqus comments so I can go back to blocking it again.)

Any advice on blocking disqus junk-related stuff while still being able to view the comments? I've tried tweaking my ad blocking in the past, and I could either let all of disqus through, or end up with their scripts behaving crazily, repeatedly trying to reach blocked contents and eating CPU.

In uBlock/AdBlock, try blocking third-party domains like .doubleclick.net or .tapad.com (but not .disquscdn.com) and block third-party cookies in your browser's settings.

I modified my blog recently to require users to click a button before disqus is even loaded on the page. I think it gives the best of both worlds.

I'd say that the simplest default is to just block Disqus by default. You can always opt in for one of the like five sites in the world with tolerable comments sections.

Disqus usually still "shows" when blocked; it just doesn't load the comments, so it's not like it'll be hidden from you that way.

While it's true that almost all the good conversation is in a secondary place, it's also true that a lot of it would not reach the author, especially if the discussion happens in a secondary place that the author would not expect it to.

Right. It's on the author to provide any means of communication that doesn't go through disqus—say, twitter, email, slack, github, keybase, etc etc. I can't think this would be onerous for anyone.

Call me old-school but email works. Everyone has an email address. It's so simple, is a standard. They can even do a fancy portal to email, as a form. Email even sits there until you have time to deal with it.

I've been using email successfully, since the early 1980s. It's easy enough for us old people to understand. Well, some of us understand it. Some folks insist on doing it in emacs, but they are few and far between.

Email in Emacs has come a long way in the past few years.

http://cachestocaches.com/2017/3/complete-guide-email-emacs-...

How does that saying go?

Emacs, it's a great operating system but a really lousy text editor.

When I first learned to use a computer, you were fancy if you had an amber screen. These days, I don't even get involved in the vi vs. emacs wars. Instead, I recommend gedit.

The other day, someone was pointing out that you could use one of the image libraries and browse in emacs with ASCII art images being generated on the fly. They were seemingly proud of this. I kinda felt bad for then and I wanted to send then a mouse.

I'm only half joking. So long as it works for the individual, who am I to tell them what to do? It does seem pretty crazy, but the world needs crazy people.

Great observation about the secondary place hosting of comments. Once I read about some of the privacy weaknesses surrounding Disqus I have dropped out of all such conversations even when strongly tempted to add my 2 cents.

    there's no reason that a) needs to happen in a public
    comment and b) that you cannot provide an email for
    people to reach you at

I blog a decent amount, and I don't like getting emails about my posts. I'd much rather have the discussion publicly. When we talk in the open other people can contribute to and learn from the discussion. Putting lots of effort in a careful back and forth conversation with a reader is much less worth it if it's a private 1:1.

(If I wanted to talk about things where people couldn't be honest in public it would be different)

I mean this is fine, so long as you realize a lot of people prefer any other method of communication and you're likely missing out on feedback.

The feedback I was getting when I explicitly invited people to send me email wasn't generally that good, plus was a lot more hassle to respond to for less benefit. People can still find my email on my contact page, but pushing people to comment publicly has definitely been better.

I agree with you but third party commenting system are terrible and hosting your own means legal liability.

I deal with this in a weird way: people comment on fb/g+/hn/reddit and then I pull the comments onto my blog via a server-side script. For example, comments on my most recent post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/paypal-giving-fund

The (terrible) server-side code is https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/commen...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com