Title should probably have [Advert] prefix or something.
That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did.
The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).
Spotify relies on monopolizing your listening data. You should avoid it on the same premise. Delivering music is easy; their unique offering is the recommendation engine. There's no competition because there's no open listening data. If we could make it open, then you could have actual competition in the space (coincidentlly Spotify recommendations aren't great at the moment).
I try not to say what might embarrass myself later, but I did use my email to create a disqus account to talk politics, which is always touchy. I got banned for a couple weeks once for telling someone to eff off after they said they looked forward to seeing liberals, gays and Jews shot in the street. Go figure.
If you want a serious paid alternative, there is graphcomment.com, the design is very neat, the team is very responsive to their user base. It’s still a human sized company. (Disclaimer: have been working for that company in the past)
In my opinion, having to shell out small bits of money every time you hit a paywall on the Internet is just as bad as having your data sold. I wish there was a viable pay-once-for-all alternative to microservices for the Web, possibly even integrated with your Internet service provider bill.
But watch the silent downvotes for this comment... and this is part of the reason why it won’t happen unless someone braves ridicule even of the very technologists who are supposedly for it.
There are many reasons to be skeptical, the biggest of which is that ads pay more (for now) than micropayments for digital content. But that’s not why stuff like this gets downvoted. It’s because the economics of capitalism make it so that you either have to be a big company with a huge fund behind the push for some micropayment standard, or you are not taken seriously.
Your whitepaper promises an all-in-one utopian decentralization panacea for the Internet. On top of that you are piggybacking off of unsubstantiated crypto hype, even though cryptocurrencies have many problems (including lack of trust/recourse between parties due to decentralization). That might contribute to the reason you are finding no traction for your idea.
Shameless plug: My friend and I are building a federated commenting system on top of Matrix if anyone is interested. You control the data, your users choose where they want to be signed up, and the system will not disappear overnight because a company decides to discontinue it. And of course there are no trackers/pixels.
When I click the cactus.chat link I get an "Ethereum Phishing Detection" message.
> This domain is currently on the MetaMask domain warning list. This means that based on information available to us, MetaMask believes this domain could currently compromise your security and, as an added safety feature, MetaMask has restricted access to the site. To override this, please read the rest of this warning for instructions on how to continue at your own risk.
Can you comment on implementation / challenges of using Matrix for this?
I've been working on a dumb git-like and been needing to add syncing. Being a git-like it could just centralize via SSH, but i had also debated a P2P platform like Matrix or IPFS.
You use case UI-embedded Matrix interaction is especially interesting to me, because some of the UIs i plan for on this git-like are WASM based, Offline enabled PWAs.
If someone wants to comment on your blog, they can write their own blog post on their blog and send a webmention. That can get linked at the bottom of your blog post with a text snippet summary.
There's no "API" beyond "curl -i -d source=URL -d target=URL WEBMENTION_ENDPOINT" in the traditional sense. Using microformats markup for better exraction is optional.
The result is a federated system of comments owned and controlled by nobody except the original author. No need to use someone's Matrix server or spin up your own. It also imposes a bit of a barrier to entry (must have your own (micro)blog), but if you don't want any random person to leave a comment that can be a feature.
Services like brid.gy turn Fediverse and Twitter comments into Webmentions as well; I've thought about using it for Fediverse comments in the past, but I don't want to host a new program or rely on a third-party service.
I think using Matrix for this is absolutely the right way to go. Does cactus conform to the threading specification? I was planning on eventually trying this myself, but felt like I should wait until the threading MSC stabilized.
Aforementionend friend and Cactus Comments dev here.
We don't support any sort of threading yet, although Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are a higher priority right now.
We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.
The author of the post runs a competitor called Hyvor Talk (he discloses this at the end). I've had hyvor talk for more than a year. I don't run a blog thats very popular, but it has been quite easy to integrate (I use React, Gatsby/ static side generation, and Hyvor Talk has a react component). An example of the system is at the bottom of that blog post. There used to be a free tier, but now there isn't. I am only still using it because existing customers have the free tier and haven't bothered to look for alternatives. Unfortunately, you can't get it free anymore. I would love to see free tier reintroduced.
I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.
I'm conflicted about the free tier thing. On the one hand, I get that personal/non-commercial sites don't generate revenue - so shelling out for a comment system is unattractive.
On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?
A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!".
"Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy invasion and refuse to pay for stuff.
"Free" can't indeed be put back in its cage, but this would also apply to real-life, and yet the majority of people don't go out stealing/robbing people even though it would technically allow them to get goods for free that they otherwise would need to pay for.
The problem isn't advertising in itself. The problem is that the law hasn't caught up (or doesn't want to catch up, thanks to corruption/lobbying by vested interests) with cracking down on large-scale non-consensual data collection (which we used to call spyware).
Ads are fine. The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough and the advertising/data collection industry is engaging in unethical and potentially illegal practices of large-scale stalking (without informed consent) to try and get extra money.
> It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?
1. Too many separate subscriptions become hard to manage. Example: the banks in my country don't allow direct access of my account movements to any budgeting apps so I have to tally everything manually because I want to track my expenses. There is a business idea here somewhere: a subscription aggregator or some such, where you can manage a total subscription budget per month and be able to cut a service easily (which is of course strongly against the interests of those you subscribed to).
2. Cynicism. I have physically met and conversed with people working in ad-tech. They have zero scruples. If you pay for a service these people will laugh at you, collect your money and then proceed to inject trackers and huge banners in the website/app with no regard that you paid for the service. You don't magically disappear from tracking once you pay. That's sadly a myth. Your narrative is correct on its surface but it was perverted and abused.
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I agree that the free tier services is like running a charity and not everyone feels like they have to. There is a business opportunity for a better model of free trials and NOT to automatically subscribe you after a week or a month. Whether that new model is in the financial interest of the gatekeepers (Apple / Google and the apps in their stores) is another discussion entirely, though.
---
Finally, I am OK paying a few more bucks a month to my ISP. So let all those services figure out a way to charge the ISPs. I'll gladly pay anywhere from $5 to $50 extra a month for everything that I consumed that is viewed as non-free.
>On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff.
Not only for that. Also because they can make extra money off of it.
So no reason to not have "shady, dark pattern, privacy killers" even to services your customers pay for.
It's because of a focus on quality and responsibility that you don't do it, not because "we already make money since our service is non-free, so let's leave the extra ad money on the table".
It's more fulfilling to offer the service for free than to have a handful of paying customers and watch the world fall into a monopoly of moderation by Big Tech.
My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried to sell it to people.
I've been thinking about that a bit recently, for a product I'm building where I'd also like to offer a free tier, but at the same time I'm afraid that it's too much of a hassle.
I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts.
I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.
Will we? Most personal websites i know of, including my own, fit perfectly within the free tiers of Netlify/Vercel/Firebase/S3+CloudFront/GitHub Pages/etc.
Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them? I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments.
Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". I picture that last one coming from the "engineers" who build those hazardous off-the-line chargers you see at gas station check out counters.
The classic answer is that commenters on a blog become a community, and that much of the value of a blog-post is in the discussion. No doubt that if often not true; but on both of my own main blogs it absolutely is. I'll point you at one of them: Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week is a palaeontology blog with a knowledgeable and thoughtful readership that often thinks of things that I and my co-author did not. See for example https://svpow.com/2021/02/01/what-a-cervical-vertebra-of-an-...
I've ran a blog that was quite popular within the torrent community. The comment section itself was a reason to visit the blog. If you have an active community or you want to build an active community comments are a must.
Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable.
If your blog is just so you can write what you currently think about things then there is little value.
The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there.
That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.
> I just don't see the value and feel that it just adds technical and security overhead, invites spam, and possibly the need to waste time moderating trash comments.
I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments.
I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely happen.
I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed. It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content.
I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500 comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker). The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks, worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks asking for tech support because it didn't work for them. Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker directly.
I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate, keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in between.
>Can I ask an honest question: Why do you want to allow random people to leave comments on your blog and be responsible for them?
Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues?
>Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post".
That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not true for other kinds of blogs.
>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.
That doesn't foster a community of discussion.
See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.
I want people's feedback and questions. I want that feedback, questions, and their answers, to be public. Email is private which means if one person asks a question my answer has to be repeated for each person. As comments on the blog others can read the the feedback and responses.
As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus. (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to disqus. I will keep on using them.
Disqus was the default commenting system for a Ghost blog theme I purchased for my humble website. It actually broke my site's functionality by directing users who had made comments to really shady advertisements. You can see a screen recording of the behavior here: https://keeganleary.com/disqus-is-evil-trash/
I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!
lmao I will continue to share anything I can build a meat mountain with! Analytics for my site on 5FEB showed 200 people visited my Disqus post and then 50 people clicked on the "Food" tag. Apparently people who consume tech news also like food a lot. Thanks HN.
At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use. The internet always have been a place where most stuff is free and people got used to that. At some point after that the dark parts and ad parts of the web will reside; but I do not think it will completely disappear.
I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there, despite all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying noise.
This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.
Hobbyist stuff still exists. But even back then, you're still talking about a small fraction of internet content.
We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content.
Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards. You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if your forum was popular.
I have a feeling every time people talk about the old hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire websites they themselves never spent all that much time on. Most people want better content than that just like most people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not hobbyists on Youtube.
Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch vlogs, they were boring."
Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when there was almost nothing online that we want to do online today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force for why there were compelling things to do online, like playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet Gaming Zone platform in 1997.
I certainly remember when most blogs were about sharing and not making money. Still, the explosion of tutorials, how tos, cooking lessons, math lessons, science shows, etc on youtube is all arguably because there is a money incentive. The bad parts of youtube (leading to conspiracy videos/fake news) are bad but the good parts (the large number of relatively well produced indie content) feels to me to be pretty awesome and that's arguably because of money.
On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself.
I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm rep.
note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a phenomenon
The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive - you're looking at some - but it's wrapped up in and presented on for-profit sites.
The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.
There are plenty of personal HTML pages out there, probably more than in 1997. But the fact is that commercial entities have created far more streamlined and addictive experiences.
The web was that way because there wasn't much profit to be made. With enough users, advertising becomes viable and becomes the driving factor in content production.
While I agree that more people should be willing to pay for services, I'm less certain that it would actually make a huge difference.
Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads.
And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out.
So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.
Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.
If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS.
If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive.
The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.
Even that may not be enough - the article mentions this, and points out that even the paid version of Disqus includes these trackers.
Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and tracking, since providers can always make even more off both subscriptions and tracking...
I already think that has happened for companies and startups, but I don't think much progress at all has been made for individuals.
I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening.
One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or letting you cancel.
> Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads ... Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening.
Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do.
If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some hacker-magnet database, or any of that.
If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do all of that.
The problem isn't a business problem or a technological problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty" allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for cryptocurrencies.
> At some point, and I feel it is close, we need to subscribe to stuff and simply pay for the stuff we want and need to use.
The problem is not everyone has the means to pay for everything.
E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't afford Youtube's fee.
Yes. And the 'paid so you are the customer, not the product' thing has limits. That was one of the original value propositions of cable television, but it turns out to be more profitable to get a platform monopoly and then sell ads as well as charging a fee.
Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.
I think this really depends on your moral compass. It’s not solely a matter of your business model. I don’t want to start paying for everything I want to read on the 50 pages I browse per week.
Disagree. Imo most content is basically throwaway entertainment (especially social media) thus very interchangeable and has very little value. The internet is simply not that important.
What are good self-hosted alternatives? I remember looking at Commento (https://github.com/adtac/commento) before, but if people have had good experiences with others I'd like to hear them.
I've seen some examples in which people embed Discourse discussions.
There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.
Lead developer at Coral here (so some experience :P)
Coral is more suited typically to larger organizations trying to power multi-site community tools. It has a powerful moderation system that's all open source! It's probably overkill for a static blog or small site.
I helped someone set up discourse[1] a long time ago, don't know how it stands up these days; it's got basically zero presence in the parts of the web I'm around.
Unfixed for 1 year, not years. I've got an instance of Commento running on two of my sites and haven't run into / heard of this issue on Firefox. Though I'm not using the Docker image.
Maybe give better steps to reproduce the issue, as it seems to only be happening to one other person?
It does seem like Commento's development has lost its momentum (last commit was 6 months ago). The author likely isn't getting more funding from Mozilla and is focusing on their primary money-maker, the cloud-hosted service.
i'm the author of Commentator, a commenting system where comments are stored on any s3 compatible store (easier to manage than a DB or local storage): https://github.com/mcorbin/commentator
It's still WIP but it supports comments approval, has a rate limiter, a challenge system to avoid spammers... I already use it for my personal blog.
I'm the founder and in 2021, in the face of the Monopolistic take over of speach and allowing communities to self-moderate, I've made the service free!
One alternative I’ve seen a few times recently is to start your own subreddit. Post your articles to it, link to the Reddit thread at the bottom of each posting, and let the conversation take place over there.
This is so amusing to me — I remember when Disqus was being built and beginning to gain traction, lofty ideas of "comments and discussions done right" were being thrown around.
I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a third party, becoming tied to them and all the data tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future.
Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-)
Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or Google+, remember that?).
Readit News
That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did.
The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).
https://listenbrainz.org/
Yeah, their data breach exposing mine and 18 million other's accounts made it the last time I used them.
My team and I went ahead to describe how it will work, and will be releasing it in 2022 after building it openly on GitHub:
https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...
But watch the silent downvotes for this comment... and this is part of the reason why it won’t happen unless someone braves ridicule even of the very technologists who are supposedly for it.
There are many reasons to be skeptical, the biggest of which is that ads pay more (for now) than micropayments for digital content. But that’s not why stuff like this gets downvoted. It’s because the economics of capitalism make it so that you either have to be a big company with a huge fund behind the push for some micropayment standard, or you are not taken seriously.
Deleted Comment
This is a hobby project that we're launching in three weeks. If you are interested, come talk to us on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#cactus:bordum.dk) or keep an eye on our (for now dummy-) landing page: https://cactus.chat/, https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments
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I've been working on a dumb git-like and been needing to add syncing. Being a git-like it could just centralize via SSH, but i had also debated a P2P platform like Matrix or IPFS.
You use case UI-embedded Matrix interaction is especially interesting to me, because some of the UIs i plan for on this git-like are WASM based, Offline enabled PWAs.
Thanks for your work here, super interesting!
If someone wants to comment on your blog, they can write their own blog post on their blog and send a webmention. That can get linked at the bottom of your blog post with a text snippet summary.
There's no "API" beyond "curl -i -d source=URL -d target=URL WEBMENTION_ENDPOINT" in the traditional sense. Using microformats markup for better exraction is optional.
The result is a federated system of comments owned and controlled by nobody except the original author. No need to use someone's Matrix server or spin up your own. It also imposes a bit of a barrier to entry (must have your own (micro)blog), but if you don't want any random person to leave a comment that can be a feature.
Services like brid.gy turn Fediverse and Twitter comments into Webmentions as well; I've thought about using it for Fediverse comments in the past, but I don't want to host a new program or rely on a third-party service.
We don't support any sort of threading yet, although Cerulean-style threading is definitely somewhere down the road. Although stuff like redactions and emoji reactions are a higher priority right now.
We're also keeping our eyes out for the upcoming spaces stuff. That might be useful for grouping comment sections.
I did find some bugs with the React component itself, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop using it.
On the other hand: the whole reason that shady, dark pattern, privacy killers like disqus exist is because people won't pay for stuff. It's at least partly cultural. We'll pay for hosting, or internet access. Why won't we pay for other services if they're valuable to us?
A large part is messaging from the ad-tech industry. Facebook's positioning in its spat with Apple is a good example [0]. "Free is your right!" "Free keeps small businesses afloat!".
"Free" is out the cage; it's never getting completely put put back in. But it seems inconsistent to both rail against privacy invasion and refuse to pay for stuff.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/ios-14-apple-privacy-...
The problem isn't advertising in itself. The problem is that the law hasn't caught up (or doesn't want to catch up, thanks to corruption/lobbying by vested interests) with cracking down on large-scale non-consensual data collection (which we used to call spyware).
Ads are fine. The problem is that apparently ads don't pay enough and the advertising/data collection industry is engaging in unethical and potentially illegal practices of large-scale stalking (without informed consent) to try and get extra money.
1. Too many separate subscriptions become hard to manage. Example: the banks in my country don't allow direct access of my account movements to any budgeting apps so I have to tally everything manually because I want to track my expenses. There is a business idea here somewhere: a subscription aggregator or some such, where you can manage a total subscription budget per month and be able to cut a service easily (which is of course strongly against the interests of those you subscribed to).
2. Cynicism. I have physically met and conversed with people working in ad-tech. They have zero scruples. If you pay for a service these people will laugh at you, collect your money and then proceed to inject trackers and huge banners in the website/app with no regard that you paid for the service. You don't magically disappear from tracking once you pay. That's sadly a myth. Your narrative is correct on its surface but it was perverted and abused.
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I agree that the free tier services is like running a charity and not everyone feels like they have to. There is a business opportunity for a better model of free trials and NOT to automatically subscribe you after a week or a month. Whether that new model is in the financial interest of the gatekeepers (Apple / Google and the apps in their stores) is another discussion entirely, though.
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Finally, I am OK paying a few more bucks a month to my ISP. So let all those services figure out a way to charge the ISPs. I'll gladly pay anywhere from $5 to $50 extra a month for everything that I consumed that is viewed as non-free.
Not only for that. Also because they can make extra money off of it.
So no reason to not have "shady, dark pattern, privacy killers" even to services your customers pay for.
It's because of a focus on quality and responsibility that you don't do it, not because "we already make money since our service is non-free, so let's leave the extra ad money on the table".
My software Remarkbox is now free for all after having tried to sell it to people.
Reference: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
I'm wondering if an open subsidized approach could work: E.g. for every paid user you allow 100 (or at whatever threshold) users to sign up for the free tier. Possible one could also set up a monthly donation system that directly goes towards financing free accounts.
I'm sure something like that has been tried, but I haven't really been able to find any good examples for that.
Will we? Most personal websites i know of, including my own, fit perfectly within the free tiers of Netlify/Vercel/Firebase/S3+CloudFront/GitHub Pages/etc.
Dead Comment
Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post". I picture that last one coming from the "engineers" who build those hazardous off-the-line chargers you see at gas station check out counters.
Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.
Also, it allows to add more value to your blog at very little effort. If you have someone who comes along and points out another use-case for your information or raises a doubt which you can answer then your blog post has become more valuable.
If your blog is just so you can write what you currently think about things then there is little value.
The common alternative these days is to have no comment section on your blog, but to post your blog posts to Twitter/Reddit/etc and have the discussion there.
That still builds community and drives traffic to your blog, but with greater potential network effects, and no tech/security overhead or need to be responsible for rando's comments.
I've been running a tech blog for 5+ years now and it has thousands of comments.
I happen to be using Disqus (not proudly, it is what it is), and I've only ever had to moderate a few comments. Disqus does a pretty good job at stopping blatant spam. Sometimes you get those people who reply with "Nice article, have you checked out example.com?" where it's clear they are just trying to drop a link to their service. But these rarely happen.
I like comments because it creates a sense of community, and sometimes with tech articles things get outdated so it's nice to wake up to see a comment saying something has changed. It's a good reminder to go in there and update your content.
I remember one of my Docker posts having something like 500 comments over the years (around setting up WSL 1 and Docker). The overall strategy worked and most comments were "Thanks, worked perfectly!" but there was a decent chunk of folks asking for tech support because it didn't work for them. Those were really beneficial to me because it helped discover some edge cases, some of which I reported back to Docker directly.
I'm a firm believer that if you're going to put stuff out there it's your responsibility to own it from beginning to end. That means writing it, making sure it's accurate, keeping it up to date, answering questions and everything in between.
Because they enjoy the conversation that ensues?
>Many blogs that I have visited which demonstrate or explain something technical with a comment section has: spam, accolades such as "great post thanks!" (not bad but kind of useless), and one I frequently see, broken English asking the author something like "please explaining how to building [complex thing] using circuit you post".
That might be true for most/all technical blogs, it's not true for other kinds of blogs.
>Want to leave me a comment? Email me or go away.
That doesn't foster a community of discussion.
See blogs like LessWrong, Lambda the Ultimate and such.
As for spam, I've had very little spam since being on disqus. (~10yrs?) memory might be bad how along ago i switched to disqus. I will keep on using them.
Also useful to see the complete exchanges to learn different debugging approaches.
I switched out for ComentBox and let the theme designer know about the issue. I will also forward him this article and have a look at some of the other comment systems provided! Thanks!
We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content.
Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards. You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if your forum was popular.
I have a feeling every time people talk about the old hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire websites they themselves never spent all that much time on. Most people want better content than that just like most people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not hobbyists on Youtube.
Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch vlogs, they were boring."
Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when there was almost nothing online that we want to do online today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force for why there were compelling things to do online, like playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet Gaming Zone platform in 1997.
On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself.
I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm rep.
note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a phenomenon
The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.
Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads.
And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out.
So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.
If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive.
The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.
Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and tracking, since providers can always make even more off both subscriptions and tracking...
I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening.
One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or letting you cancel.
How do you see the money side playing out?
Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do.
If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some hacker-magnet database, or any of that.
If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do all of that.
The problem isn't a business problem or a technological problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty" allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for cryptocurrencies.
The problem is not everyone has the means to pay for everything.
E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't afford Youtube's fee.
The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.
There's also Coral (https://github.com/coralproject/talk) which used to be Mozilla + Vox project before Mozilla handed it over to Vox completely, but I have no experience with it.
Coral is more suited typically to larger organizations trying to power multi-site community tools. It has a powerful moderation system that's all open source! It's probably overkill for a static blog or small site.
[0] https://posativ.org/isso/
[1] https://www.discourse.org/
What parts of the web are that, if I may ask?
I think Discourse is popular in software and tech related organizations — I see it a lot on such websites.
(I'm developing it. Open source: https://github.com/debiki/talkyard. Not yet so well documented — soon time to add more docs, ... as per this nice discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26002656 )
https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/-/issues/174
Maybe give better steps to reproduce the issue, as it seems to only be happening to one other person?
It does seem like Commento's development has lost its momentum (last commit was 6 months ago). The author likely isn't getting more funding from Mozilla and is focusing on their primary money-maker, the cloud-hosted service.
It's still WIP but it supports comments approval, has a rate limiter, a challenge system to avoid spammers... I already use it for my personal blog.
There's also Isso[1] and utterances[2] (Github issues based)
[1] - https://posativ.org/isso/ [2] - https://github.com/utterance/utterances
I never understood Commento's SSO system. We went with HMAC instead.
I'm the founder and in 2021, in the face of the Monopolistic take over of speach and allowing communities to self-moderate, I've made the service free!
Reference:
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
Worth reading the publicly released statement.
One alternative I’ve seen a few times recently is to start your own subreddit. Post your articles to it, link to the Reddit thread at the bottom of each posting, and let the conversation take place over there.
I never bought in to the hype, and considered carefully whether I want to "outsource" and give away comments and discussions to a third party, becoming tied to them and all the data tracking/gathering that they might choose to do in the future.
Fast forward 10 years or so, and here we are :-)
Own your data, people. Don't give it away just because something is nice and shiny today. Don't outsource data. And don't write articles only to post them on Facebook, LinkedIn or Medium (or Google+, remember that?).