A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.)
I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?
Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.
There used to be the Trackback system that would allow someone to write blog post and "ping" the blog post they wrote the response to. I am not sure what happened to that system.
>Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented
Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using <platform>.
In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because the level of discourse is just much higher. Can you imagine sifting through potentially _millions_ of comments, many of which are of youtube level quality? Maybe fragmentation is ok here.
For me on Firefox on macOS that is just a couple of key strokes away:
cmd-l cmd-c ctrl-a r <space> u r l : <enter> cmd-t cmd-v ctrl-a h n <enter>
I have set up `r` as keyword to search on Reddit and `hn` to search on Hacker News [1]. `url:` is the Reddit keyword to search in the url field of the items. (In Firefox, you can right click any search field and add a keyword bookmark for it.)
Part of the problem is the walled garden affect of Facebook, is there a public API that provides you with links to public posts about a piece of content ? I doubt it, although Facebook uses this internally to show me random strangers blathering about various news stories. Twitter might be easier but still not sure if there is something that an API can query to find links to a certain article or piece. I remember back in blogging days there was a ping back functionality that was supposed to do something like this.
Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.
I had a go at building this general idea as a browser extension about 5 years ago, but abandoned it as writing browser extensions is a pretty fragmented, horrible experience. The general idea was take the current page URL, hit Reddit/HN various APIs and coalesce various posts (multiple for Reddit) and single HN instances (perhaps with and without hashes, "?new" and other reposting conventions).
So in order to use this, you need to host a new Node app and SQLite database on your server. Also, things like spam control are now back on you.
So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.
Because you like everything else about the static blog (static files are easily hosted and trivial to move to other hosts or CDNs, many devs like the integration with git, you like the workflow of doing everything locally until the push to publish, good hosting solutions that scale a lot are really cheap).
If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments are down, not your entire site, assuming the static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved again).
Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog works for this.
It is trivial to make a static blog CDN-friendly, not so much CRM like Wordpress. It is doable, but the amount of efforts is non-trivial.
In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.
I feel the same. I wonder if a free heroku account and a docker image of the setup would work if you really wanted this? Seems like full on DevOps is not necessary for a very self-contained simple commenting app like this if you wanted to self host with minimal cost/effort.
For people who write their own CMSes (like myself), this is hella useful. I look forward to adding this to my blog once more features get added, although I'd probably switch the database to MongoDB.
Another thread on the front page right now is talking about how it's very difficult to get views on your blogs now. And I've felt the same.
5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like.
Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then.
Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.
Setting up a server and installing commenting software, and configuring OpenAuth etc login takes some time.
If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. It's open source (https://github.com/debiki/ed-server, I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things people here at HN might like:
Go to https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb Javascript bundle.
The point of Disqus is that you don't have to host anything and you can publish an essentially "static" website using any static website generator or just plain HTML pages you make yourself.
At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.
first off , if you turn off ads on disqus there are no 3rd party requests. maybe that will change with the new owners but it's disingenuous to claim disqus is doing something bad here when there's an option to turn it off.
Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-spam features I got tons of comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more than 2 spam comments per year since.
Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?
I thought the whole advantage of Disqus was that you can keep your static blog static w/o hosting the server machinery for handling comments a la Wordpress?
Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?
One advantage of not using WordPress is not having to spend a couple hours every week restoring the latest backup you have because you got hacked again.
I find the proposition of moving off Disqus and the performance improvements in shnack very compelling, but worry about managing spam and a server.
I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless.
Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?
It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every day!).
That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.
I make this type of comment a lot, but what's up with naming nowadays?
How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site?
How about integrating a microblogging system like Mastodon in websites so that you don't have to maintain a security sensitive service just for your blog?
I wonder if one of the keys to HN's success, apart from great moderation, is that poster's identities are very subdued.
I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it.
By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit.
I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar and a provocative username. Which does not naturally lead to considered response.
Why not remove comments entirely? Most people engage on secondary platforms (twitter, facebook) anyway, and most comments are garbage in my experience.
Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.
I think disabling blog comments makes sense these days. In my previous experience managing a wordpress blog, 90% of comments were garbage and the most meaningful discussions happened on platforms where discussions are a natural fit (reddit, HN, Twitter)
[+] [-] md224|8 years ago|reply
I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary occurring across the web. Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented?
[+] [-] ehnto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ploggingdev|8 years ago|reply
You can see it in action on this page : https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/
[+] [-] franciscop|8 years ago|reply
Seriously thinking about giving it a spin, remove the parts that HN was not happy with and relaunch it.
[+] [-] styfle|8 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-10-16-es6-mo...
[1]: https://medium.com/@styfle/22969cd360f0/
Medium allows you to import pretty easily and sets the canonical URL so Google (hopefully) won't get confused with duplicate content.
[+] [-] frankquist|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EpicEng|8 years ago|reply
Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using <platform>.
In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because the level of discourse is just much higher. Can you imagine sifting through potentially _millions_ of comments, many of which are of youtube level quality? Maybe fragmentation is ok here.
[+] [-] eref|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://hn.algolia.com
[+] [-] seepel|8 years ago|reply
hn:
reddit:[+] [-] ad_hominem|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotbikes|8 years ago|reply
Usually if I find something interesting in the tech sphere I just find people commenting about it on Hacker News and it's a tight but broad enough community to get good discussion.
[+] [-] taitems|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|8 years ago|reply
Surprised no one else has pointed this out, but that was one of the original problems that Disqus was trying to solve. E.g.:
https://www.usv.com/blog/disqus
[+] [-] rayalez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas7900|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Cyberdog|8 years ago|reply
So why not just use a CMS or blog engine which supports traditional server-side comments? I suppose there is a case if you're hosting static HTML pages but still want them to be commentable, but how many people are doing that? I don't get the use case for this.
[+] [-] detaro|8 years ago|reply
If something goes wrong with the server you host (suddenly tons of visitors, some failure), only your comments are down, not your entire site, assuming the static hosting is on other infrastructure (and even if not, it's easily moved again).
Maybe you used an external service before and want to get rid of it, like the example in the article, but do not want to completely change how your blog works for this.
[+] [-] hyperion2010|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _0w8t|8 years ago|reply
In addition it improves the site security. An XSS bug in commenting code in Wordpress can allow the attacker to become the administrator for the whole site. A similar bug in commenting engine only allows the attacker to damage the comments and temporary disfigure the site with straightforward recovery.
[+] [-] hckr1292|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisSD|8 years ago|reply
And having user content on a separate domain isn't a bad idea from a security pov.
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|8 years ago|reply
5-10 years ago I used to get 2-3 digit views on my posts. And I used to use Wordpress / Blogger and the like.
Then, when it became fashionable, I spent a lot of time (at least 20-30 hrs, and mind you this was not the geeky kind of work, it was like refactoring code using just grep) converting the blog to one of those static generators, and I suspect that I spent more time migrating all posts than the TOTAL TIME all readers combined have spent on my blog since then.
Now I am almost regretting migrating and definitely have no interest whatsoever in spending any more time doing DevOps for the blog.
[+] [-] KajMagnus|8 years ago|reply
If you want to skip all that, you can use Effective Discussions embedded comments, demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. It's open source (https://github.com/debiki/ed-server, I'm developing it), no ads, and has the features Schnack has (notifications via email) and some unique things people here at HN might like:
https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...
Go to https://www.effectivediscussions.org/ and click Create Forum and then choose Blog Comments if you want to try it out. (I hope some self promotion is ok.) It's also lightweight, just a 140 kb Javascript bundle.
[+] [-] tallblondeguy|8 years ago|reply
How does this project compare to Mozilla's Coral Project[0]?
[0]: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html
[+] [-] overshard|8 years ago|reply
At this point just build your website around the numerous CMS/Blog options available that have numerous solid comment and spam prevention systems.
[+] [-] modinfo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman|8 years ago|reply
Otherwise the number one reason I stated using disqus is spam. I wrote my own blogging and comment system in 2000. When that got spammed I switched to WordPress around 2008. Even with their anti-spam features I got tons of comment spam. I switched to disqus many years ago and I think I've had no more than 2 spam comments per year since.
Disqus benefits from being everywhere in that it can see a bad actor and prevent them from being bad everywhere else. How will this system handle that?
[+] [-] gidan|8 years ago|reply
https://graphcomment.com
Disclaimer: I work for this company.
[+] [-] tomc1985|8 years ago|reply
Schnack takes you back to square one? At that point why not throw up a wordpress install?
[+] [-] martin_andrino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hckr1292|8 years ago|reply
I haven't looked at the repo yet, but I wonder if it would be possible to make the datastore pluggable so that you could replace SQLite with, say, DynamoDB. It seems like at that point you could potentially keep everything serverless.
Barring that, would it be possible to separate out the frontend code and define an API such that a lambda function and serverless backend could be produced for this?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article that they are related to. You could set an arbitrary vote level cutoff limit.
[+] [-] nkkollaw|8 years ago|reply
How is Schnack pronounced? How easy do you think it would be to tell somebody to try it out and how high are the chances that they'll misspell it and give up finding the site?
I don't get it.
[+] [-] dominikmauritz|8 years ago|reply
Here is the translation including audio: https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/schnack
[+] [-] Analemma_|8 years ago|reply
And I don’t think software projects with inscrutable names are a new thing. I still have no idea how to pronounce “PostgreSQL”, for instance.
[+] [-] mbid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkavon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|8 years ago|reply
wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.
[+] [-] beachy|8 years ago|reply
I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it.
By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit.
I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar and a provocative username. Which does not naturally lead to considered response.
[+] [-] misnamed|8 years ago|reply
Ironically, while trying to post this comment I got ... Bad gateway: The web server reported a bad gateway error.
[+] [-] cosarara97|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drdrey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] EGreg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alhafizco|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] andrewalan|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] noncoml|8 years ago|reply
That's what worries me about every single website out there. Suddenly they consider users' comments "their own data"