@therealmarv, @gingersnap and @vortico:
I suggest you take a look at EffectiveDiscussions: it's open source + hosted for €2. Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments
It has improvements over Disqus ... and HackerNews: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can....
GitHub: https://github.com/debiki/ed-server. It's more lightweight: the script bundle is just 140kb in comparison to Disqus 750kb. (I'm developing it.)