Blog comments on a static site via social networks | Hacker News Reader

Blog comments on a static site via social networks

berk.es

6 pointstodsacerdoti10 comments

I like this. I wish the underlying service was self hostable though.

It reminds me of Upvote Anywhere which adds related Reddit discussions on (almost) any site. - https://github.com/z0ccc/Upvote-Anywhere

It is open source and can be found at https://github.com/xojoc/discussions.

I have no idea how feasible it is, nor if it was designed and developed with self-hosting in mind.

Oh now that is interesting!

The entire problem would be solved, mostly, if more sites would support and use webmentions by default. That way we don't need centralized hubs, we don't need to have a gazillion sites polling HN/Reddit/etc either. Just a simple ping from A to B, indicating a link.

Or am I missing something obvious here?

How would that work on a static site? Would I need to run a (tiny) service that accepts incoming webmentions and then expose those? How do webmentions deal with spam?

We had "pingbacks" back in the day. They were abused by spammers to get backlinks to their vi@gra, rolex, etc websites. My blog got thousands if not more per day of these pingbacks. Has webmentions solved that?

For a static site, you could use a stand-alone server like webmentiond[1]. Seems like that'd integrate similarly to what you're running now, but under your own control. There's also webmention.io[2] if you really don't want to self-host.

As for spam, the flow involves the receiver checking the sender to see if there's actually a link, before the mention is accepted. I think that is more effort than the average spammer is going to put in, although it's not 100%. Then again, neither are comments on somebody else's site.

[1]: https://webmentiond.org/ [2]: https://webmention.io/

I don't like this. When I read the comments on a blog, I want to see a discussion moderated by the author.

Do you have any examples where this happens? I read a lot of blogs, but hardly see any in-depth discussions appearing under the posts.

Also, when the author moderates, do you trust any critique to stay online and maybe even be countered?

> Do you have any examples where this happens? I read a lot of blogs, but hardly see any in-depth discussions appearing under the posts.

Scott Alexander's blogs, Slate Star Codex[1] and Astral Codex Ten[2]. Andrew Gelman's Blog[3]. Marginal Revolution[4], though that doesn't seem heavily moderated.

> Also, when the author moderates, do you trust any critique to stay online and maybe even be countered?

No, but that's why I like both. I like seeing a discussion not moderated by the author, like on HN, to see more criticism, but I also like seeing a discussion more respectful towards the author, especially on topics where on HN I'd only see contempt towards to the author.

[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/

[2]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/

[3]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/

[4]: https://marginalrevolution.com/

I do feel that contempt. Just today my blog got a HN frontpage [1] place and the ensuing discussion called me everything from "stupid" to overly dramatic to just plain wrong.

I like that though. It keeps me sharp. And forces me to re-think and back up my statements. I'm pretty sure I would've just plain /dev/nulled quite a few of the comments there where they on my blog.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185010

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