When I forget to sign in to YouTube, I see the same pattern, shitty ads that are clearly only allowed because otherwise YouTube wouldn't have sufficient ad inventory to meet their internal KPIs.
Meanwhile when I watch YouTube I get a stream of: "5G blocking beanies", highly questionable medical products, gross out ads about poo and etc ...
It really degrades my view of YouTube / Google.
Who buys pillows because of email spam and YouTube ads? I don't get it. It's probably not a scam, but a very obnoxious company nonetheless.
Some people are going to buy those pillows based on those ads. Others are going to think the ads are stupid but will remember the brand and are now more likely to choose it if they see it in a store. Ads persist because overall they work.
I'm not fully sure about this, an ad network which does that very reliably can probably charge the ad provisioning companies extra due to it being on more high quality sides/locations and pay out extra little due to having "high quality low disturbing" ads.
But with the Google being a quasi monopoly for ad networks on any open platform and most people either blocking all adds or no adds there is just little room for alternatives. I do use uBlock Origin for some custom filters, but I which instead of "on" / "of" there where "on but more like privacy badger" / "on full" / "off" with the first being the default so that users can create an insensitive for better ad handling.
Costco has an entire section of affiliate links to manufacturers they have worked with. The people who go there get special discounts on the products purchased from those manufacturers, and the only ads you get about it are on Costco's site reminding you that this section exists.
Websites could easily add a "shop" page to their sites and screen and curate a selection of companies willing to pay an affiliate link bonus to the site when users purchase through those links.
This would help them generate income while also not enshittifying the site or experience for users.
The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!).
I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care.
FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?
I'm happy to pay for media, news, social networks etc. I don't purchase things based on anything other than personal recommendations and research. I have no use for advertising, and I have no desire or need for ad-supported platforms. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. People say advertising works, and that justifies it. The thing is, advertising only works on enough people to justify it. Everyone else hates it with a passion, or studiously avoids it. I'm not sure if we're a majority or a minority, it doesn't matter, but we suffer advertising and wish it were gone.
Advertising needs to change. It would be nice if it just went away, but realistically that's not going to happen. It needs to be recognised as harmful and regulated as a harmful product.
I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush.
First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for yet another AI agent company as generic as the rest. Literally the organizations he’s railing against and calling wasteful. It was clearly because he handed off the advertising to one of these injection services.
Sidebar: these ads tend to perform terribly. Actual ad reads by the host(s) are the only thing that lead to meaningful conversions in podcasts.
Hmm. How are these people not part of the industry exactly?
First I've ever heard this, and I have been working in marketing all my life.
What exactly do you mean by this? Where have you heard it?
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
This is more or less artifact of HN algorithm, it's common to get single digit votes for majority of your posts. Whether something blows up feel almost random, you have to get pretty lucky to hit a time window when there's not that many posts or a lot of people look at new page and upvote the post at the same time to make it snowball. Many links are posted multiple times with no traction and then they suddenly blow up on 4th attempt.
In blogs people can come along anytime and use comments to add additional information/context/perspectives, point out misunderstandings or outdated information, share updates, pose questions and start interesting conversations that do not have an expiration date on them.
The discussion for the article can be found on the same webpage by readers, they don't have to go looking on external sites, most of which have terrible searchability and now require logins just to view content and can delete threads and valuable discussions arbitrarily.
I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.
As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.
Then I built an alternative using free Cloudflare Worker
https://github.com/est/req4cmt
It's a simple service that transform comment POST form data to JSON, append to a .jsonl file, then do a `git push`
It renders comments by `git fetch` from a .jsonl file from a remote repo, or simply via raw.githubusercontent.com if your repo was hosted by Github.
The advantange over Github issue/discussion based comment plugins:
1. All data is stored a .git
2. no login of any sort
Github OAuth login might leak all your repo data along with your `access_token` to the plugin provider.
The `git push` works for any remote. You can choose github/gitlab or whatever.
You now have a direct way for users to insert data into your repo, which can include illegal things. And if you're required to delete it later, you'll be forced to edit your git history.
But if everyone behaves, it's a great solution
Yes, and spam is also a huge concern.
I plan to mitigate by adding "Pull Request" style moderation next.
And you can switch to a private repo
For mass moderation, just git clone, grep the lines, sed them out, and `git push -f`
Remember the use case is for static generated personal blogs.
I'd argue it's even quicker than, say a paginated bloated megabytes javascript rendered single-page application moderation system.
In case of comments you don't like, just delete the line and `git commit`
to erase the history entirely, use `git cherry-pick` and `git push -f`
It might be a nightmare for people not familiar with `git`, but for folks running a static blog like Hugo, they use lots of shell commands anyway.
They certainly do, but for they same reason why people chose static site generators like Hugo over Wordpress, I'd like complete control of full data.
The good value of static-hosted comments is that you `git clone` for backup and `git push` for redudency.
I also dislike managing DBs. Think of all those mess with backups, migrations, imports, exports, difference between mysql/pg/sqlite/d1. Tons of operating cost just for the sake of few blog comments
It's just a bunch of .jsonl files, the last resort is direct inline those .jsonl into .html files when generating
isn't that better IF the commenter has a GH account? (if you're writing a personal tech blog, then it's not a problem, your readers are Github users already)
Github issue or discussion based plugins require OAuth
If you look closely, some OAuth scope requires "Act on your behalf". Others require "repo" scope which means read your private data.
It is estimated that between 30% and 50% of Internet users run ad blockers. I haven't see a single ad in years.
Besides, Pi-holes are kind of overrated. First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective. Second, Pi-hole is kind of heavy for what it does; you can accomplish the same by loading a blacklist directly to the config file of Unbound/Bind/Dnsmasq.
But for my use case, I like having the Pihole UI to see the charts and it's nice for temporarily unblocking one domain, etc.
Here is an excellent alternative to running Pihole that I've used before: https://www.geoghegan.ca/unbound-adblock.html
Damn. I played around with PiHole years ago on an original Raspberry Pi Model B, and kinda forgot about it--it broke some stuff, and most of my connected devices could run their own adblocker.
Only in the past year did I finally buy a "Smart" TV and leverage its existing GoogleTV apps, because I got tired of trying to maintain my aging Kodi Box. I should probably setup PiHole anew and point my Smart TV's DNS at it...
I'm curious when I see quotes like this - are people exposing their home network to the internet? Or running a pi-hole in the cloud? VPN'ing into the home network? Or what?
I have run a pi-hole in the traditional sense (a raspberry pi with pi-hole software on my home network with my home router DNS pointing at it). But this doesn't prevent me from seeing ads when I'm out and about on 5G or public wifi or work wifi or whatever.
As an aside I stopped running pi-holes at home for reliability reasons. Lots of failed SD cards, locked up raspberry pis etc became more aggravation than it was worth. It's a neat system - when it's working.
A lot of nerds also have some form of private overlay network with default DNS to adguard or pihole or similar, again, making for identical adblock experience on all platforms.
On my phone I do both: I use AdGuard DNS to block ads system-wide, and Vivaldi's built-in ad blocker to block those ads that still slip through.
If you are coming to a blog post of mine that has been shared to you, my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section. I am aiding you by not even putting a comment section there.
I realize there is a slim chance for there to be enlightening conversation in a blog comment section - but that is not what my blog is for. You are better served doing that here on HN or a more dedicated forum. Here it can be be more visible for others, for people who want to read discourse.
Sending an e-mail is not the same thing, it's like Youtube removing the unlike button count and instead sending the info only to the creator.
This doesn't apply to your blog, but I've seen low quality or misleading content without a possibility to comment. Even worse: scams that include a fake comment section.
Besides the general issue with the assumption, what prevents you from using a non-distracting style instead?
Pfft. Half of the fun on the Internet is arguing with people about what other people said. I like to link to this blog post with over 500 replies about a constructivist who doesn't believe in the well-definedness of real numbers and shows up in the comments to respond to people: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th...
I really do not believe that blog would be better by not having comments enabled.
I propose to you that you should be in favor of a diverse internet, that is blogs that have comments sections, blogs that have likes, blogs that have neither, and blogs that do something else. That is probably the most enriching outcome.
Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/ZOBUNBg.png
The size of it, above the comments (and under as well of course). That is madness.
I'll have to check some of the alternative listed in here. I could just code it but I really don't want to deal with spam and moderation... Or maybe I'll remove comments altogether.
Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.
Still, since we do not get that many comments these days, I’ll probably postpone it and just provide a static render of existing / historical comments which does have value for archival and discussion purposes.
It dumps all pages and articles as markdown with most Wordpress metadata as front matter metadata, and all comments in a separate yaml file which can be processed as needed. It creates a minimal theme with the necessary templates to do a basic static render of the content. It does need some theme and template tweaking to match Wordpress url structure and ensure all pages end up in the same url/permalink.
I also used a Wordpress hugo exporter plug-in about 3 years ago - worked mostly the same.
Using Hugo still allows me to more easily add content to the site while maintaining a consistent templating and design.
I also experimented with doing a simple static dump of html as generated by Wordpress - I tried two ways, using wget —-mirror which kinda worked but generated a lot of redundant pages, and a Wordpress plugin called “simply static” which was supposed to do something similar but in the end didn’t work.
In the end I decided against the static dump because it would have entirely “frozen” the site in time - I did want the ability to add content down the line; or change the design without having to modify the content significantly. Archiving sites verbatim is best left to the experts at archive.org :)
I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
¹ https://jszym.com/blog/mastodon_blog_comments/
² https://jan.wildeboer.net/2023/02/Jekyll-Mastodon-Comments/
³ https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
https://kau.sh/blog/bluesky-comments-for-hugo/
I like my implementation cause it blends really well with the blog making it looks almost native.
transferring the burden of maintenance - curation to a social media platform (and a slightly more open one to boot) has been a complete win.
https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
have been pleasant.
If I where to ditch it to save the money, I'd look into integrating Mastodon into the page, I saw somewhere that they used Mastodon as their comment system (it's basically a thread on Mastodon that is embedded in the blog page).
Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.
What would be more useful would be an automated list of places where the post has been discussed (and maybe pull the top comments from there through API?)
Social media ruined that. Everyone is now on their own soap box posting comments of drivel from their sub-optimal self-conscious parroting asinine talking points about how one characterized group of statistics ruined it for everyone else. Bots, drivel, linkbacks, social media, stupid laws, and an aversion to independence - we have what we have today. Large platforms that trick humans into use because they have the largest arenas.
Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads. Because they ran ad-free for so long it’s possible their token in the AdTech ecosystem is stale in which case it hasn’t put it into any buckets yet. Ergo, you get the smoking/drinking/scamming/doesn’t fit category.
A “token” is a device or ident signature used to identify a viewer or user so that they can tabulate impressions, build personas, categorize your shopping habits, track the sites you visit, link your token with others in your proximity
Well, so they may see worse ads.
Partially agree, partially disagree. Blog comments were already dead when SEO fraudsters discovered that "linkbacks" could be abused for spam even easier than comments were.
That grants people an easy way to discuss content and to check any prior discussion, if any.
Something like https://lists.sr.ht/~shugyousha/public-inbox for example.
For small websites a good start is to get comments by email, publishing only the ones that adds value to the article or conversation. Why? Because we have lots of noise done by social media. A way of curating the comments increase the quality of the website.
If the website gets traction, than it's good to consider a tool to facilitate the commenting and moderation.
Bravo for this banger of a new word.
Here is another one https://docs.coralproject.net/
But that's a temporary solution.
Sure, I can code an in house comment system within an hour, but the real work is to combat spam. Because people (and now also disqus) suck.
I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...
> showing some CORS error
In my case, I found it annoying when cookies gradually stopped working, and eventually I had to make the software use custom HTTP headers instead of cookies.
> Seems that mostly spammers comment
The more interesting the contents of the blog is, the more real humans will like it and post comments? (if they can find it)
But a "Our company posts something each day, even if nothing has happened" blog, or AI fluff, attracts only spammers?
Instead, I went with a tight solution that minimized 3rd party interaction: GitHub Discussions leveraged using the Giscus app (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...). You have to have a GitHub account to post comments using this method, which I like because my blog is geared to those that would have that.
Ads don't just show things, they forward you to websites that vibrate your phone and claim you won prizes on ebay, amazon, or apple.
Those ads and scripts are on completely legitimate newspapers, ebay, etc.
It's like those companies never use their own product or actually pay attention to what's happening.
The internet without adblockers is largely unusable and dangerous.
I made Bluniversal Comments partly for this, but there are other Bluesky-based solutions out there if you prefer.
On one hand there is the impact on web sites which will lose more traffic but on the other hand this will kill the trash ad networks (maybe good in many senses but problematic from antitrust perspective) and also also a lot of trash sites that dominate search results. No more fandom, no more Forbes. The trouble is that the web accessible from Google has been so bad for so long that people aren't going to miss it.
For instance I've been playing the game Arknights where there is a pool of 366 'operators' of which every player has a subset so it is difficult to give a walkthrough that works for everyone and you often have questions like 'Should I use resources to upgrade operator A, B, C or D?' and AI Mode gives me a good explanation of the tradeoffs -- the alternative is Fandom sites which have endless incomprehensible tables or spending hours surfing Reddit where half of the opinions are off the wall, complete garbage ads are blended seamlessly into the content and god forbid I accidentally hit the mouse button anywhere because I get navigated somewhere completely random which might be NSFW.
Similarly I was helping my son look for a rackmount MIDI synth and you could spend hours watching people drone on about it on YouTube or looking at Ebay listings or other sources or you could get some good choices that are well explained and have some links.
The "dead internet" is finally going to die.
I would totally agree that this makes your site look like an armpit of the internet, but also - there was a way to figure out that this would happen ahead of time. Google Ads last I checked weren't nearly as bad, but even these were prone to scams and malvertising campaigns on sites I've frequented.
Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
Comment systems are useful/effective when someone is paying the full cost of moderation.
Posts could show both under the article (like "normal" comments) and for aggregated discussion on Bluesky / any other app that renders Bluesky posts.
And you'd get "free" moderation (at least for basic stuff) from the Bluesky mod team.
I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
But, the solution I've been looking for/prototyping is one that lets people comment from the Fadiverse, so it will also double as a feed. Nothing to show yet, but one-day maybe.
They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
Does anyone have advice for handling blog subscriptions? I'm thinking of switching to Kit, which has a free tier that seems reasonable. Paid services seem to start at $50/month, which is way more than I want to spend. (Originally, Blogger handled subscriptions automatically, but Google removed that feature.)
Example:https://dalevross.rosssquared.org/blog/2013/08/16/pi-lovin.h...
If anyone is able to confirm that they're not seeing ads either, I would be grateful.
The barrier to entry is a feature and not a bug.
They are not suitable for one-off comments on a blog post. In particular, I'm not even sure how you could make it possible for a normal user using a standard mail client to reply to a comment that was posted before they came across the blog post.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comme...
Having written my own multiple times and used several others before disqus I’m unlikely to switch unless the new thing is super compelling and I believe it will stick around.
Spam is hard to deal with. Akismet fails miserably for me. disqus has the fact they can track users across sites. Spam one site and you’re off all sites.
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
Which means complete control of all your github account.
We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
There is FOSS option built on nostr you could explore called nocomment. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment.
License is public domain.
You also get no control over the level of abuse, misinformation, and spam on those external sites.
The joy of having comments on your own site is that you can moderate the bad-faith discussions and curate a friendly / helpful atmosphere.
Yes, you need a small database to receive and serve comments. Spam is mostly taken care of with a hidden field. It is great to build a community of commenters who want to offer their thoughts.
It is revolting how riddled the default web view is with advertisement and that the only way to browse sanely, you must install an adblocker.
We need a better model of financially supporting websites and services, not all companies are simply greedy, there are bills to pay, but it's gotten ridiculous.
Yes. I think Disqus is trying to get money from the long tail of blogs that enabled Disqus in the past and never bothered to look up for the policy changes. I am sure they started with small, non-invasive ads and eventually got bigger until we get in the situation that we are today.
So even if someone enabled Disqus in the past because they seemed a reasonable system a few years ago, their blogs are now an ad farm and the original owner may have zero idea since it is a blog they abandoned years ago. Heck, my old Wordpress blog that I don't even remember the password is probably an ad field nowadays that is probably generating pennies for one of those companies.
I liked the comments, they were infrequent and OK, but I'm not going to add an alternative, maybe in the future when I feel like it.
Either pay the money they ask if it's worth having comments, or build your own system.
I became “blind” to what the web is really like for most users. I’ve tried to keep this blog minimalist - a clean place to find answers. Those ads not only ruin that experience; they trample privacy too
If you have any recommendations for alternative commenting systems (especially those that respect privacy or are self-hosted), I’d love to hear them!
You probably mean a PHP that can be hosted for cheap. But then, you end up with a Wordpress nightmare, even more spam and security issues.
I had a pretty popular blog and some posts gathered hundreds of useful comments. But I was so tired of fighting spam that I threw it all away and started using Hugo too, without comments.
It is now 2025, Unless it is an extremely popular site where every blog post has hundreds of comments. For most blogs hosting your own comment section shouldn't even be a rounding error or expensive. Why do we still have to put up with Disqus?
Blog like Michael Tsai [1] do it just fine. You submit a comment it render the page on server.
[1]https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/29/ios-26-0-1-and-ipados-26-...
Online "targeted" ads eliminated the gatekeeper in favour of a free-for-all where shady companies are encouraged to hide their identities so they can simply advertise under a different name when their ad account eventually gets banned. 20 years ago I was seeing scam ads for "mail order brides", "free iPods" and "legal buds", today its crypto scams , political spam and misinformation.
No lock-in, except for GitHub, I suppose.
Maybe anonymous commenting by just solving some captcha is impossible nowadays because in practice all captchas get broken by spam bots immediately. Or maybe not. I would like to see evidence for that first before giving up and choosing a commenting solution which strictly requires an account.
Or just leave it. Nobody needs to comment on blog posts, really. :D
Ironically, if you look at the screenshot, just below the comments' section, you will read: 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data'. Seriously?! You are already torturing my visitors by throwing many ads, at the same time, on their faces. How can I trust you?
Also, what drives me cra*y the most about online Ads is that they are random and have no relation with the content of the page I am looking at. Oftentimes, they went extremely far by showing what I consider near explicit content.
Utterance.es is GitHub issues backed comments, which is an inherent barrier to commenting, but YMMV if that's an actual problem (generally the value of unbarred comment sections is abysmal). Like remark42, it's open source, but you're relying on a third party's servers.
[0]: https://github.com/umputun/remark42
[1]: https://utteranc.es/
Perhaps there should be an open source alternative. Why isn’t there one by now?