Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
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.
The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.
I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best but you can't expect them to successfully weed out every single bad ad".
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.
It's been that way a long time with other media. I used to work out a lot during the day and would wind up watching TV in the daypart aimed at people who don't have their own money to spend on things and there were ads running for about a decade that were obviously a scam.
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
> It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
Because scams are a threat to the serfs, and people spreading the truth about global events and issues is a threat to the powerful. That's why I really don't bag on "slacktivists" anymore. I'm not saying there isn't SOME truth to the notion that people reliably pick the one kind of activism that doesn't require getting off the sofa, it's a fair critique. However even that kind of activism is now heavily policed around the humanitarian crisis that won't be named.
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
*no enforcement any longer. Back when we had Lina Khan at the FTC, she would have enforced it. Now we have a scammer-in-chief only enforcing laws against his political opponents
She started enforcing it against the most egregious offenders, but for every enforcement action, there were thousands that went unpunished. The problem is that FTC proceedings are very process heavy by design, which is what you want in some cases, but doesn't scale to widespread scam. We need to be prosecuting hundreds of thousands these cases every year if we want to make a dent and turn things around to fraud being a rare exception rather than a normal business model.
I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue.
The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
It's not even that there's no enforcement... you could talk to your state's AG. But their budgets aren't infinite, and the scammers are overseas as likely as not. Unless the scam rises above some (absurdly high) threshold or threatens someone very important/wealthy, it's going to be back-burnered.
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
Google Tag Manager is a malware vector. It's very design is to distribute non-Google code through a supposedly trusted source. They are part of the problem and JS blocking is the only dependable safeguard.
It'd be relatively easy for Google to screen out and filter ads... Charge enough when creating an account or starting/changing a campaign. Then you can pay staff for manual review. They could charge $1000 for account creation (half of which you get back after the first year), then they charge even $20 at campaign creation/change... They can even provide context/feedback, "Sorry, but this seems misleading, doesn't relate to what you are linking, is scammy, etc." And have an additional "check" of each ad and target after a day, a week and a random point within each month. Charge an additional minimum of $20/mo per ad for (re)validation.
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
My mail server easily gets the most phishing attempts from gmail. This is due to my unwillingness to blacklist Gmail. I report the abuse through there abuse page. The results in a slowdown while the abuser reformulates their sending process. I know this by watching the changes to the sending path in the header of the phishing attempts. The content and subject often don’t change but the header does.
I bet that if you were using gmail, those phishing mails would end up in your trash ... which raises the question: why does Google allow people who Google's own spam-filter can detect are sending 99% spam to keep sending e-mail?
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
I agree, I would be using an ad blocker even if all the ads were "only" annoying attempts at manipulating my behavior rather than scams and malware. But pointing out that ads can damage your computer or scam you out of money or information is a stronger pro-ad-blocking argument.
Genuinely curious: why do I always get scammy ads in iOS apps and Google products but I don’t see anywhere near the same amount on Instagram or TikTok?
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
IG, TikTok, Meta have a lot of data they can use to do good ad targeting that is harder to apply to Google/iOS apps. Also has to do with the ad format, placement, etc.
Some formats are better than others. The Meta products comparable to GDN (audience network, various banner ad placements in its platforms) also kind of suck. Google wishes they had a feed based website, thats where people respond to direct respond ads in a big way.
When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
> When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
She uses a super cheap Chromebook. Unfortunately I don’t think Firefox can be easily installed on it? I don’t think it’s even x86. It’s a very limited device, but all it needs to be capable of is loading Facebook and a few other specific sites- so it “works”
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?
From when I worked in the video ad industry, the industry standard was that an impression was binary and seeing a single frame of the ad counted. IDK if YouTube follows the Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines, but they probably do. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xandr/industry-reference/i...
Quite a bit - I get ads for septic tanks because I have looked at them several times and tank companies continue to advertise for me because I might buy. I get ads for robot mowers because, again, I looked at them. I still see "the bottom of the barrel" ads occasionally, but it's very rare. Ad blitzes on the other hand ... (no, I don't want to build an app just-by-thinking-about-it) ...
At one point a few months ago, YouTube seems to have gotten the idea that I have some kind of bowel problem, and I'd constantly get ads about my "stuck poop." WTF? I'm watching a woodworking tutorial, I don't want to fucking hear about poop! Total bottom of the barrel.
Several months ago, my wife bought several bottles of pureed pumpkin babyfood, because small amounts added to catfood can treat some feline stomach issues.
Now, we're getting diaper commercials all over youtube. I assume we're flagged in some database as likely having a new child, but you can't ever know for sure.
Just remember, advertising is responsible for the rage economy. It's responsible for platforming misinformation. It's responsible for screen-addiction in children. It's responsible for online scams. Just think of all of the proposed laws and regulations around the world that are trying to counter each of these problems and remember that the root cause, and enabler of all of them is advertising. It's truly an amplifier of enshittification, and one of the worst conduits of bad social behaviour ever invented. If you're in the ad / ad-tech industry, please seriously consider the effect you're having on the world.
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.
It also doesn’t help that so many creators - even legitimate ones - now use injected ads that they don’t verify at all.
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.
Cool Zone Media podcasts kinda famously get farmed ads that run counter to their content. they claim they do what they can to influence that (ahem... Washington State Highway Patrol and all the gold scams come to mind) but i wonder if signing their souls away to ihm removed a lot of their agency in that regard.
and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
I’m not even against pre-recorded spots by whoever the sponsor is if that’s his deal though the conversion rate on those are not as good. It’s just the completely random ads that the podcaster(s) don’t even know are playing on their show. The entire reason advertising on podcasting was more effective in the 2010s and early 2020s was because there was a little more trust with their listeners, there’s a relationship at play even if it’s parasocial. If they were actively reading on air, I assumed that they vetted the company and it at least passed the smell test (though plenty sure didn’t, I would say the bar was a little higher than other media formats).
where are the ads injected? I use a couple of podcast "apps" and neither inject ads, all ads in podcasts are explicitly put into the audio file by the people making the podcast, even pre-roll and post-roll ads.
No, that's incorrect. Not one of the podcasts i listen to re-master their mp3s, the checksums stay the same. In fact, most of the podcasts i listen to have no ads at all. I wonder if there's some misunderstanding, here. If i go watch like an LTT video where they had a sponser, 5 years ago, that same "native ad" will be in the video. I'm specifically saying that the podcast apps i use do not inject ads, but podcasts themselves will do native advertising, i consider these completely different things.
Just to be clear, are you just saying the shows you listen to don’t do DAI, or are you doubting that DAI exists at all? I only ask because of your comment before the one I’m responding to here. It almost sounds like you think it isn’t possible or that no one does it.
a "podcast" is just an mp3 file, usually fetched by finding the URL via an rss feed. I am asking, perhaps a bit cheekily, "who is putting ads in", because that isn't a "feature" of podcasts. Stop getting podcasts from places that put ads in, support "podcasters" that don't do this scummy crap.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
I know what a podcast is, I have produced them for clients. I am honestly unsure what our discussion is about at this point.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.
Hosting services drop them in. You sign an agreement with them and they have agreement with advertisers who drop their spots into your show using DAI. Often it’s a straight up bid-system but the podcasters are not part of the process, or the podcasters can do the read and hand it over to be inserted. This means that podcasters in a lot of situations don’t actually know what ads are being run on their show.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.
when i use either of my podcast apps, it fetches an mp3 file (or streams it) and there's no additional ads (read this as "no additional non-native ads") that "change" when i listen again in a year. This means the podcasts that i listen to, i suppose, are not hosted on hosting platforms that inject ads. Because, as i think needs to be reiterated, podcasts are just mp3 files. you can host them with caddy, or nginx, or apache, all pointing at some file(s) in ./www/html/mp3/ One does not need to host it on "Acast" or other "podcast hosting providers", a podcast is just an mp3 file, which can be automatically fetched by anything that can download both rss and mp3 formatted files.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
That’s a (good) choice by the shows you listen to. There are plenty of ad injection services for podcasting, pretty sure Acast (popular hosting service) has it built in for instance. Search “DAI podcast” or “dynamic ad insertion podcast.”
The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.
i can write that in like 2 minutes in any language you want.
`pseudo
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return True
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There's a difference between "Need a tree cut down? I am licensed and bonded and cut down trees; call ###" and the sort of things that we all consider "ads". If someone can't see a difference, then that someone probably receives money from advertising.
One of the few sorts of ads I'm okay with are those sort of ads for local businesses on the paper placemats at local restaurants. Those stick around and are seen by countless people so if it's a scam word will get around.
It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.
They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.
I've been receiving email spam from Derilla, a pillow company, for many years. Once the manifest V3 abomination went into effect in Chrome, I also have to endure it on the frontpage of YouTube.
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.
> Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
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.
Having worked in the world of e-commerce, there are genuinely good companies run by good people making genuinely good products that no one knows about, and one of the ways they try and get people to know about their products is advertising. In one case, this is a product that replaced something already in your home, it's materially better, and it's materially cheaper in the long term. How do you create an ad for that that doesn't sound like a lie?
It's the way it used to be done with paper catalogues. If you're looking for a snowmobile then you go get a snowmobile catalog from a dealer who you looked up in a phonebook. But advertisers don't want to wait for somebody to decide they want a thing, they want to brainwash otherwise content people into wanting something they didn't previously want.
Hacker News does not advertise because it is a gigantic advertisement for YCombinator. This is not some sort of scurrilous accusation, they may not be constantly banging the table about it but it's not a secret.
Hacker News does not depend on me buying products from it for it's survival. If you can't see the difference in why a company cannot depend on word of mouth, then you're just really not trying to have an honest conversation.
Come on. There is a massive difference between an ad that optimistically emphasizes the best aspects of a real product or service and an ad for a fake product or service that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
It's legal to advertise real products or services that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
For example:
- gambling, e.g. slot machines, sports betting
- healing crystals
- palm readings
- carnival games
Perhaps the right distinction is whether something is legally a fraud or not. But I kind of agree that most ads are scams and also that ad networks don't have the ability to separate legal scams from fraud. So I just block them all.
Yes, these scams have aleays been there. The distinction was that advertisers like newspapers and magazines had a standards body that would reject ad placements that were insulting to their audience's intelligence.
I know television is not newspapers and magazines, but they at least had to have some level of standards bodies (I'm fairly sure they at least did in the early 90s), and I remember Psychic Friends Network ads on tv which is clearly in the realm of palm readings. I guess maybe it wasn't insulting to the intelligence of people watching late night TV in the early 90s?
I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same can be said for basically all other phone OEMs, and if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable.
>and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.
If you're defining "ads" to be a "problem", then it turns the statement into a meaningless tautology. Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
> Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
Hey, you're starting to get it, but not quite.
Only crappy brands use ads, because ads pollute my very valuable time, my very valuable window of vision, my very valuable hearing, and my very valuable sanity in trying to stay safe against malware hiding in advertisements. That's on top of wasting my valuable money convincing me to buy things that I don't want to buy.
If a brand really wants me to use their product, then make a great product and show off its features in demos, at conferences, and it will eventually get to me by word of mouth. One friend showing me how a product has improved their life is worth at least five-figure digit counts of ads shown to me, if not six-figure counts.
In the case of iPhones specifically--which I see a lot more ads for than appliances--people do upgrade phones a lot more frequently than appliances, especially major ones, often for specific capabilities like cameras. So reminding people they don't have the latest and greatest makes a lot of business sense.
I would guess that a company like Apple (or Miele or whatever) pays some attention to the context in which their advertisements appear. I don't think they'd want an advertisement for iPhone to appear online with a weight loss pill on the left and a gambling site on the right.
I should start by saying that I find ads incredibly irritating in any form. That said, Miele and DeLonghi are both more than a hundred year old companies. Maybe they don't need to advertise because they have such solidly establish brand identities, but they do advertise and they have advertised throughout their history as companies. Ads are a way of maintaining brand awareness, introducing new products, and creating demand. Even if you have an incredibly solid product with good word of mouth there is still benefit to advertising it.
This is something people don't credit enough. How many times have you search for something by name and received a direct competitor's product as top result? This is why I put no stock in digital ads for the little guy. The bigger guy will always have a larger ad buy budget and will outbid you at every turn.
Two of the three names are unknown to me. This word of mouth delivery did nothing to make me interested in any of the three though. I have no idea what any of them actually do. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as how best to internet search "Henry".
All 3 are appliance manufacturers. Miele and Henry are predominantly vacuum cleaner brands.
Henry hoovers are ubiquitous in the professional market in the UK and well regarded for durability, performance and the cute face all their cleaners have. Essentially anyone in the UK will have used, or seen one be used
> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
I'm guessing high-end appliance brands are enough of a niche market that it just doesn't make sense for them to advertise in relatively unfocused ways. You'll see plenty of ads for high-end appliances and cookware if you frequent gourmet-oriented websites and magazines.
I remember back in the good old days (so like 2008) you'd visit the some bigco website looking for specs on some item and then later you'd see their products in your banner ads. Times were so simple back then.
I'm willing to throw that away to get rid of the scammy ads. It would be nice if there were ad networks that were vigilant about who they let use their service, but "money", I guess. So adblockers it is.
Right, the title also doesn't state the bit depth the color values are stored. There could be 64, 128, 256, 1024, 64million shades. Data Inadequate. I'm really surprised this was missed on this forum!
Seems like the ethical way to have ads on your site is to do it the way Costco does.
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.
This is the other side of ad tracking. Good ad tracking means much more relevant ads. The only advertisers that can afford to run on untargeted ad inventory are lowest common denominator products like teeth whitening and weight loss.
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.
I just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
It will last long enough for even the more determined keyboard warriors to get bored of arguing with themselves and typing in all caps YOU DON'T EVEN CARE DO YOU or similar…
TBH, I have considered writing a version (this isn't my work at all, yet) that does submit the blathering server-side so it looks like there is a useful round trip, but:
* I have more important projects awaiting the much fabled arrival of Free Time!
* While it could potentially keep an idiot “happy” longer, I'd have to mess around with some sort of login system to give the right people the right comments back, it couldn't rely on a just session ID as that would be as volatile as the comments in local storage.
* Taking in the data gives the possibility of DoS by extra routes.
* Giving back the data gives the possibility of the comments being abused as a Heath-Robinson-esk storage device!
This is hilarious, I love it. I've thought about rolling my own comment system for a blog and thought it'd be fun to have a local LLM decide if I should even see the comment to approve/deny or not. Could be fun to browse the rejected comments periodically.
I use HN a fair amount. I often post articles here but I also feel bad about doing it because 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong. I think it might be good to cross post everything here and link to the HN comments for discussion. Is this frowned on at all? I always worry I'll get shadow banned or something for my 100 low vote posts. Here's the rule I worry about:
> 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.
> 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong.
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.
There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.
But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:
- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).
- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.
- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.
- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" <https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".
I don't understand the point of that first nitpick, this is an algorithm, at least in the normie sense of the word as a ranking system for list of posts.
> A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect
This is exactly the problem.
> what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects
I would challenge that point. Power law comes from some feedback loop, which is partially from network effects but it can be massively amplified by the system, which is exactly what HN does. Not only it bakes the power law directly into the score eqaution, but it also shows the list sorted by score by default, which creates a positive feedback loop on votes.
Actually I'm a bit perplexed that it works this well, HN algorithm was one of the first that I implemented on our site and it was quite terrible even after a lot of tuning. I feel like it must be tuned for some volume of posts and people, otherwise it doesn't make much sense to me.
In the context of social media, or more generally, user-submitted and user-generated content, which would subsume HN, "algorithm" is virtually always shorthand for algorithmic amplification, with an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures. And that is what HN explicitly does not have.
To the extent that HN does utilise specific procedural mechanisms to adjust the priority of content, it's virtually always away from the typical patterns of algorithmic amplification: less emotion, less outrage, fewer hot takes, less nationalism and relgious flamewars, and specifically toward "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.
It would be possible, yes, though incredibly disingenuous, to argue that what HN is doing is itself amplification. Yes, any curation is an amplification of some content over other, but in a world where "algorithmic content" means clickbait, brain-crack, and stickyness, HN is quite clearly aiming for something else.
If power-law dynamics were purely the result of manipulative algorithmic amplification, we'd see them only in online media subject to such amplification. And that's simply not the case. Power laws are fundamental to not only all of human communications and interactions (word and letter frequencies, for example, neither of which suggest a strong influence by algorithmic amplification), but to all manner of natural phenomena, including those entirely outside the realm of biological activity (e.g., frequency/magnitude plots of earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar novae).
And in the realm of interpersonal online communications, HN's goals and interventions (mods, voting, and some programmed mechanisms) are desperately trying to swim upstream. As someone whose online tenure pre-dates the Web and extends to pre-Eternal September Usenet, HN has done remarkably well, and outlived many of its antecedents' and competitors' useful or entire lives (Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Google+, et cetera). Trust me, I'd love to see it do better (a view often voiced by mods as well). But in an ordinal ranking with what actually exists it's an exemplar.
This isn't a nitpick, it's a core and central point with (literally) universal applicability.
Honestly, I think this is quite naive view of the problem. The negative properties are emergent and emerge from even the simplest rules you can think of. Sort something by likes and you create feedback loop that incentivises attention seeking behaviour.
HN of course have all of these problems, just look at what we're doing now. It's in some ways better and some ways worse than others.
It's trendy these days to blame the algorithm or social media companies, but these problems are way more fundamental. Thinking that this platform and even you yourself is somehow immune to this is delusional.
> an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures
Yea, again, this is naive oversimplification that's just been popular recently, but those are not endgoals and often go against platform goals. Outraged users don't click ads and increase revenue, they cause problems, drive other people away from the platform, same is true for the other issues.
As somebody who's been working on a social media platform for 7 years, I just can't hear this stuff anymore. Those problems exist, they are hard and much deeper and more difficult to solve than most people think.
This has disadvantages though! Often the threads on sites like HN/reddit get "archived" or lose traction and you cannot join the discussion if you don't happen to discover the article in the first few days of it getting published.
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.
Counterpoint, blog posts age; information or opinion from 10 years ago may no longer be accurate or reflect the author's held beliefs. Is it still worth discussing it then?
That said, I run old fashioned forums and some older threads get revived there from time to time with new insights. Others get flagged up by copyright holders under DMCA takedown threats or bumped by spambots though.
I wanted to add that some zombie/necro posts are useful outside the context of HN.
For example on retro computing boards it makes me so happy when someone bumps a 5 year old thread to share new details, benchmarks, etc. about some card or motherboard where the ancient thread is first thing that appears in search results.
Counterpoint: the last dozen it so times I've wanted to leave a comment on a website, I scrolled down to find that comments were automatically disabled 24hr/a week/year after the post was created. Nobody wants to deal with moderating comments.
Perhaps one could link to cross-posts from the blog? Maybe a "Discuss on HN" button. And the solution to avoid spamming HN is to avoid writing a large volume of low-quality content on the blog.
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.
Worrying about editing git history buries the lede. Any comment system allows users to insert data into your site, which, if it might be illegal things, is a legal risk.
and the wasted CPU and memory involved. Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system, it is overcomplicating it in ways previously unimaginable.
> Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate.
Maybe, maybe not. Before 2024, my blog got <10k views/y. Then in 2024 it got close to 1 million (this year it will likely be 100k). Very hard to predict traffic thanks to hn and stuff!
Your implementation might be static json files, but it's not impossible to force other filetypes in there. This in itself makes it high risk?
Allowing force-push is considered an antipattern for Git, and generally best avoided. It's a safeguard against lost history and prevents data loss.
That aside, the comments are the history. Git is the wrong tool for the job. Why would you choose a generic version-control system designed for source code diffs & merges for the specialised task of chronologically-ordered comments? A database such as PostgreSQL is a far superior choice in just about every possible way. I admire your ingenuity here to make something out of what's available, but I respectfully disagree with this being a good way to capture user-generated content when there are better alternatives.
.jsonl files are fine for low volume comment threads I think, but others have already mentioned the use of git for storage. Would sqlite or Cloudflare's own D1 (SQLite compatible, also available in their free plan) work as an alternative?
> Would sqlite or Cloudflare's own D1 work as an alternative
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
pardon my ignorance, but isn't there a solution that adds a Github comment box right below your post, and you comment directly with your Github account?
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)
"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."
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.
I personally feel differently about the Pihole. I run one and it blocks a lot of telemetry traffic from smart TVs, apps like Netflix, etc. that are not originating from a browser. I'm showing a 23.1% block rate today.
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.
> I personally feel differently about the Pihole. I run one and it blocks a lot of telemetry traffic from smart TVs, apps like Netflix, etc. that are not originating from a browser. I'm showing a 23.1% block rate today.
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 bought an apple tv box so I could disconnect my samsung TV from the internet forever. I think no matter what you do they will find a way to spy on you through your TV. I'm sure there are android boxes that will do as well as apple TV too.
One could argue however that the Apple TV box also spies on you. It is just more limited in its ability to be malicious because it does not have a microphone or a camera. But it is still a problem because Apple, like Google, has fingers in many pies (phones, email, file storage, watches, smart devices) and can build very detailed profiles of individuals.
I don't use "pi-hole", just an in-browser blocker (ublock origin) and am happy. But I would assume a "pi-hole" would be a useful addition to a household using a variety of potentially ad-infested devices e.g. a smart TV, various tablets etc.
The issue is that (some) smart devices are known to bypass local DNS servers entirely. They either use a public DNS server or hardcoded IPs. The best thing would be not to connect any "smart" TV to the Internet. These are closed firmware devices with cameras and microphones and they just can't be trusted.
> The best thing would be not to connect any "smart" TV to the Internet.
Agree! I regret letting my Vizio TV stay online for as long as I did.
At first it was fine, and I did get a UI refresh a couple years back that was OK.
But then some update caused it to start ripping control away from whatever my last HDMI input was so it could show me ads (which fails). Even though it's perma-offline now, it still messes with my inputs sometimes.
Spot on! My samsung TV menus are soooo much better in terms of snappiness by having Pi-Hole running and also setting up DNAT for those IoT devices who want to hardcode their DNS.
Yes! This is easy to do on OpenBSD as well, though it's called "redirect" instead of "DNAT":
pass in quick on $int_if inet proto udp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53
pass in quick on $int_if inet proto tcp to any port 53 rdr-to $dns_server port 53
I also redirect port 53 traffic, and in addition filter traffic to "well known" public DNS servers like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and many others (lists can be found on GitHub), but this is ineffective against ads and telemetry served from hardcoded IPs.
Overall, it's just easier not to connect "smart" devices to the Internet at all. I prefer to use a Linux HTPC instead of a smart TV for example. It is completely under my control and I am not restricted to apps approved by Apple or Google, asked to log into anything or to accept ever-changing terms and conditions.
There are native, easily accessible ublock variations for Firefox for Windows, Linux and Android.
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.
I run ublock in all my browsers and devices, but other people on my network (family) don't, so pihole helps there. Its really not an either-or question, they are complementary.
That seemed to me like a radically high estimate of people who use ad blockers. But I see that the first page of results on MyFavoriteWebSearchEngine support that claim.
> "After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."
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.
Wow thanks for the reminder! I have a small side project [0] with Disqus and got the email there would be ads but didn't think to check it out and due to ublock I was kind of oblivious to how they looked.
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.
From conception, I've never wanted a comment section on my blog. I just put a line that in effect says "if you want to comment, you can send me an email at xyz".
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.
It's a bit sad that content creators, from individuals to big companies, have to (or at least feel like they have to) disable comments on their content, wether it's a video or an article.
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.
I agree. Your blog represents you, so it must be fully curated by you. Others' opinions, you can always pull them manually into your website whenever necessary in whatever method and format you prefer. There's no reason to be bothered by random strangers injecting random things onto your own persona. They can always go to other communities if they seriously want to talk about your posts.
>my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section
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'm not in any way stopping you from having half your fun there, be my guest. I personally find internet arguments to be a waste of time most of the time, but the internet is wide enough to accommodate both camps.
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.
>I'm not in any way stopping you from having half your fun there
I mean, you are. You are adding friction to the process. If someone wants to talk about a post of yours they have find some forum where it would be relevant and link to it. I don't know what it looks like on your end. Maybe adding the ability to comment would be more effort than you think is worthwhile, but if it was as simple as a checkbox, you would still leave it turned off, am I wrong?
>I personally find internet arguments to be a waste of time most of the time
Of course it's a waste of time. So is blogging, as well as many other activities humans engage in.
>I propose to you that you should be in favor of a diverse internet
I'm naturally going to be for an Internet that accommodates the things I want to do, against one that doesn't (when it could), and indifferent about one that accommodates things I'm not interested in. I don't know what your blog is, so I don't want to comment on it, so I'm indifferent whether it gives readers the ability to comment, so I don't particularly care to try to convince you do anything.
But, I have felt that tiny bit of frustration when I read or watched something and scrolled down to see what people said about it and saw there was no comment section, either by design or omission. Sometimes that has been enough to disengage me from the thing in question.
I like the way Mark Seeman (ploeh) handles blog comments. He asks users to open a PR[0] with a comment on the post. Obviously the volume of comments is very low, but it sure is effective at targeting the right audience and keeping the bots out.
I did the same. I was sad to lose the comments, but the ads were awful and I don't particularly want someone elses ads / tracking on my hobby site. I switched to gisqus [1], which is powered by GitHub discussions, which seems to be working ok. (The site is hosted on GH pages so seems reasonable to also use GH discussions for the comments.)
I was so hopeful for Cactus.chat built on matrix, but like all products built on the matrix protocol, you have to follow their mantra of being unusable and undiscoverable. The main page for cactus chat even quit hosting the JS file and none of the maintainers think that's a problem lol.
Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.
Hmmm, wouldn't it just be easier to make a new room for a new blog and just call it directly from the web client end? Not e2ee style to support more clients?
I’m in the process of converting a Wordpress blog to a static site. We did have significant comment traffic back in the day so I did look into how to maintain comment functionality. I found Comentario https://docs.comentario.app/en/ which is a standalone comments engine that can be self-hosted and linked to the blog page. Single stand alone Go executable, SQLite database - seems dead simple and has built-in ways to migrate Wordpress comments.
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 :)
Removed Disqus from my website after getting huge spam waves (not the classic garbage spam but "real" comments, but for completely different sites, like they were intended for other sites but instead posted to mine. They were all from a few days old accounts). I wish I'd have used the built-in WordPress comments from the start but well, it was a different time back then. Related: I've used WordPress Jetpack Stats until they extorted every free website, no export possible. Would've cost me 200 € per year, that's more than I pay for my website. Switched to self-hosted Umami but 10 years of data just gone.
As far as alternatives go, there was an interesting post a few weeks ago on using Bluesky as a commenting platform. It improves discoverability and adds a social aspect to comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164
I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
I use Hyvor Talk - https://talk.hyvor.com - for ad-free and privacy respecting commenting on my blog. I really wanted something that I can just use as a service, not host anything myself. But it's quite expensive.
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).
If you are a small personal site, you can request a free upgrade to the Plus version (which can remove ads) by emailing publisher-success@disqus.com and asking.
I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days.
This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.
This constant difference between the original title and its censored version contributes into the whole impression (this, plus the lack of any moderation log) into the whole community to be very much censored and demotivates me to be here. Which isn’t a bad thing for me personally, the domination part, but the censoring part for no reason is quite disturbing.
Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.
In this case, keeping the original title would allow you to be better connected to the reality. But this is not what some actors want - they want you to stay disconnected, and thus easily "influenced", to put it mildly.
Disqusting is the copious amount of trackers they inject in the websites.
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.
I think the concern of "blog comments" is best left to external platforms eg HN, Reddit etc
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?)
There used to be a time when comments were attached to the posts. Where anyone could come, leave their name and a comment, and let the author know if any edits, misspellings, or how they liked the article.
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
> 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.
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.
Correct. Site owners moved their communities over to social media pages because they couldn't handle moderating the waves of spam comments that littered every single post on their site. They figured, let Facebook/Twitter handle moderation. Then FB closed the gates, de-emphasized posts with outbound links and now site owners are screwed.
For those of you stuck with this issue reading this, there is a nice open source commenting system I found on GitHub https://valine.js.org/en/index.html
I have an email address for comments at the bottom of my blog posts. If they can write me an email and it's something that contributes to the discussion, I'll include it in a comments section at the bottom of the post. For bigger discussions, cross-post to social is the way to go.
That's exactly how periodicals worked for a hundred years. A letter to the editor that is published in the next edition. That's how I always mentally viewed blogs and expected most niche sites to eventually do that. In fact, a local "neat things" blog was successfully doing that for quite a while.
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...
Then you might find Talkyard interesting: https://blog-comments.talkyard.io — reminds of Disqus, in that it's threaded, best first (optionally). (I'm developing it.)
> 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?
When I was evaluating ways to add comments to my blog on GitHub Pages, I quickly passed by Disqus because it was a 3rd party service that I didn't trust for reasons like this.
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.
All centralized services will eventually present a variant of this disease and indeed almost all are already. Actual baseline improvement in technology requires fully decentralized software similar to bittorrent and it's ilk imho.
With very little fanfare Google added an "AI Mode" button next to the search which adds a much more competent question answering engine than those awful summaries that appear at the top of most searches. (On a yes/no question they often give different answers and the "AI Mode" is right)
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.
These look like standard disqus ads. Which is to say - like you see when you scroll to the bottom of a Breitbart article.
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.
Proof of concept: the best blog commenting system I’ve seen uses ActivityPub (to integrate with Mastodon). It’s utterly easy to use, and pretty seamless. I don’t know what it’s called or if there’s more than one implementation, but you can see this in action at jwz’s site and a handful of others.
Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
I've found https://remark42.com/ works well with static sites, and has plenty of user login options.
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.
When the ads showed up I immediately put disqus loading behind a "load comments despite ads" button, and instead just had a static export of the comments loaded by default.
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 stopped to use disqus a long time ago. Instead I am using hugo2nostr to publish my blog post on nostr network. So, all nostr users can comment in their clients.
Giscus is a cool comments management solution vis Github:
It lets users auth through Github then posts comments as discussions under your repo.
We use it here for instance: https://predibench.com/models
I like giscus too, it’s pretty neat. It makes a lot of sense for tech blogs since the audience likely already has a GitHub account. And the comments being hosted in discussions makes them easy to backup in case you want to roll your own comment system someday.
I don't know why but I never commented on a disqus blog, ever. Something about it makes me feel like the author didn't care too much about comment and gave us the IKEA version. No issues with it, works well, but it feels sterile.
I encountered a similar problem with blog subscription services: I was using "follow.it", which would handle subscriptions and send out an email when I have a new article. It worked fine until follow.it went spammy a few months ago, switching to emails that were mostly objectionable junk ads.
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.)
I didn't notice this problem, but then I realized that as I'm using Brave browser ads might be blocked by default. So I tried in Chrome and still no ads. I'm using Jekyll for my blog so I wonder what's saving me from this issue.
I took Disqus out of my blog back in March. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Disqus had started to feel quite icky. I exported 18 years of comments from Disqus and wrote a little code to include them in my static site generation process. Now I just stick a footer with an e-mail link (and Mastodon thread link, if there is one) on each of my posts on the website and RSS feed. I get few comments, anyway, so I'd rather not subject everyone to all that tracking and ad nonsense.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't a self-hostable, open-source JS injected comment system similar to Discus available. For me, I'd like to stay as close to SSG as possible for blogs, and only load comments on-demand for users. Just to give the best initial impression of the content. One of these days I'll finish out my setup and get back into blogging.
I used to use Disqus on my blog a long time ago, but dropped it with one of the many reboots. Having comments on a blog still seems like a good idea but I'm still half minds over on-page vs fediverse-based discussion, or maybe even both. Spam is a constant problem.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be running for a day, or even a weekend.
They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
When it was released there were no ads at all, and it was a great way of quickly adding comments to your site. Of course there is no thing as free lunch so the enshittification was inevitable
Same here. I removed Disqus a while back due to how obnoxious it became. Then, I built my own commenting platform and, while it was a fun thing to do... I think it's worthless. People don't comment on blogs anymore, and when they do, the value is too low. Discussions happen elsewhere now. I've been tempted to just remove the comments altogether but haven't gotten to it.
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.
There are a number of websites I like, like https://quoteinvestigator.com/ but I'll never send links to them to people that I think may not have ad blockers (my Mom on her iPad, etc) because the non-adblocked experience is so awful.
I suspect 99.5% of blogs like this don't make any appreciable amount of money from ads. Which begs the question, why even do it? If it cheapens your readers experience and you are not making significant money from it, just don't do it at all. Everyone thinks their blog will make money, few do.
Maybe I'm just lucky but looking at special interest blogs I appreciate the comments from other users/experts/makers. Diqus is the latest in a string of commenting tool and they all seem to have issues over time. A favorite blog resource of mine got nuked after the comments were filled with spam, and possibly used to hack the site. Unfortunately the blog was a collection of years of specific experiences in places with very little other information for that activity. I've talked to the owner about getting information in the years since and he's been helpful, but building the site back would take too long for him, so it's mostly gone. The comments there were useful for updates from people who visited those locations, or found alternate routes/approaches.
Same. I bit and upgraded my account to get rid of the ads. But it still didn't feel great using their software, so I just built commenting into my site after switching from static site to a fullstack setup. They made it difficult to cancel the subscription. I had to send an email to cancel it... like what?
I was in the same boat and built my own commenting system. It has an importer for disqus (so you don't lose your old comments) and also imports Mastodon replies.
I keep using isso https://isso-comments.de/
I installed it on my static blog very easily, and I own all the data.
Also it is GDPR-compliant (because it provide hints on how to remove data like IPs) and it is very light.
For me Disqus and similia are a dead end.
I removed Disqus 7 years ago when I noticed their Javascript+HTML embeds ballooned my 75kb static blog into 3mb+ with sluggish loading times. It also failed every Performance test like Chrome Devtools Lighthouse Perf Tab.
We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
Ugh, i feel u. Disqus ads have gotten way out of hand. It’s such a shame because the platform used to be so clean and user-friendly. It’s almost like they’re trying to ruin the experience. Definitely time to ditch it for something better. Any better alternatives?
For everyone saying "just have the comments on social networking sites" - that fragments the conversation, makes people sign up to a service if they want to comment, and exposes them to ads on 3rd party sites.
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.
Unless you're famous enough that everything you post gets to the top of Google, no one will read your content unless you post it to a social media platform with a curated audience. Literally no one but bots and AI crawlers. I mean, you have a whole list of crossposting links at the bottom of your own blog posts, including to HN and Mastodon, so you clearly understand. You wouldn't lose anything by limiting comments to just those curated social media platforms except spam and bots.
Looking through my recent comments, the majority are from people filling in the box on my posts. So, yes, I would lose a lot if I switched them off.
You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog.
That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.
I was actually going to suggest importing comments from a Fediverse account like Mastodon as a solution to that problem but I saw you were already doing something along those lines.
I'm trying Mastodon comments on my own blog, that I'm not posting here because it isn't really ready, from my own Mastodon account. I'd never even consider public comments anymore, it just seems like inviting trouble.
I wish there was a Git way of commenting even anonymously (not necessarily without auth). Then a site like this, written with Hugo, could keep all the comments and the moderation/spam could be built in with a GitHub authorization.
It's disgusting what the internet has become, in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads, not that that would justify it. And then you have companies like Google who will punish you intentionally for using tools to reduce the amount of spam you're exposed to on your own device.
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.
> in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads
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 didn't realize Disqus is still alive. Yeah, there's no use in embedding things like this if it doesn't even bring in the traffic. You gained 0 and they gained 100.
I forget what HN linked blog post it was, but I noticed a bunch of ads on a website, and realized it was all from Disqus. It's a shame because it looked like the website owner had them setup.
Disqus has been dead for years. Haven't seen it used on a legitimate blog or news sites since it was bought out. This was kinda expected. It's the Digg rot at work.
I tried we mentions for a while, but then switched to just POSSE (publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere). So the comments are moved to other platforms atm.
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
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times: the free and open internet died decades ago and is being propped up in Google’s yard as a scarecrow against public outrage. Online display advertising is a scam at best — it has to be terrible, because it’s just not very effective otherwise.
If you have any recommendations for alternative commenting systems (especially those that respect privacy or are self-hosted), I’d love to hear them!
I’ve heard great things about ATProto comments (aka “comments through BlueSky”), tho that’s obviously more setup. But this might not be the guy for it; pretty funny to see “hit me up on X” right next to calls for privacy, self-hosting, and authorial-control…
I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
Comments are the only functionality of a blog that require write access to a backend, without comments a blog can be a simple collection of static files. Any write access to a backend exposes the blog to potential vulnerabilities, requires the backend to be kept up to date. This is not dead simple and does require maintenance. Updating is not trivial if a version of a backend becomes obsolete, you need to dedicate time to migrate your backend to new versions to stay secure.
Indeed, the problem isn't necessarily even the site being taken over. There was an example of what happens to comments over a period of 9 years without anyone dealing with spam on Hacker News just the other day.
False equivalence. That the creators of various PHP blogging platforms sucked at security does not invalidate the poster's point that a self-hosted CMS with a simple comment system is indeed much simpler and easier to reason about.
The wordpress core can be kept up to date but the vulnerabilities from plugins, relying on fixes and updating plugins i think was more the problem than the core.
In the 2010s if you left a wordpress blog unattended even with the official default filter plugin it would fill with spam comments. I dont know if thats still a problem.
My own blog - which gets maybe a couple of posts a year these days, and almost no audience - had 59 spam comments so far today. It really is time I turned off comments.
Without comments it's much simpler and cheaper than a $5 VPS and a random CMS, with comments it's much complicated and expensive than a $5 VPS and a random CMS.
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.
Edit: And for other similar services, blocking ads or using DNS solution that block ads it will refuse to load the comment section.
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.
There was once a time when advertisers had to show some creativity in their ad copy to develop brand recognition and stay within the editorial guidelines of magazines and newspapers.
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.
Enshittification is everywhere, unless you own your stuff. I know it's easier to use a third-party service, but please, consider hosting your own content to keep full control over it.
That requires a GitHub account, which most readers on most blogs won't have. Moreover, I'm pretty sure most people (>50%) who would have commented, probably won't do it if it requires creating an account for an external service first.
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.
I had a similar incident with Disqus. But I didn't even know they were showing ads on my website because I had Adblock enabled. Until a user without adblock emailed me. facepalm
> With this post, I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse, and frankly, they were profiting off my work and my visitor’s data.
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.
In terms of blogs, for selfhosting comments, the main ones that seems interesting for selfhosted setups are probably remark42[0] and utterance.es[1]. Remark42 is a low barrier Disqus clone with social logins (as well as just plain usernames) that also makes it fairly easy for users to bulk export their own data (as well as delete I think?), which ought to take care of most GDPR stuff.
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.
Ah, color me shocked that capitalism leads to enshittification over time. Why would people embed a for-profit third party platform in their Web 1.0 site and let them do whatever they want? Because they don’t have the software to do “social” Web 2.0 stuff themselves.
Perhaps there should be an open source alternative. Why isn’t there one by now?
Other than the volume, one of the issues I have with these types of ads is that you're rarely able to report them as scams. Reddit have a similar issue. You can report an ad, but you have to pick "Other", there's no: "This ad is clearly a scam". That's by design obviously, because by removing the scams, most of the ad networks are left with very little inventory. Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
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.
The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem, but the truth is the entire industry is complicit with the scamming, and stuff like this shows it. If the ad industry were merely hapless victims of the scammers, rather than willful participants in the scamming, they'd be eager to receive reports of scams.
I feel like there are almost two completely incompatible stories being sold by ad tech people. One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware". The other is that any time there's a story about malware and scams on reputable websites, they say: "there are so many ads being submitted, Google is doing their best but you can't expect them to successfully weed out every single bad ad".
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.
It's been that way a long time with other media. I used to work out a lot during the day and would wind up watching TV in the daypart aimed at people who don't have their own money to spend on things and there were ads running for about a decade that were obviously a scam.
https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
> It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
Because scams are a threat to the serfs, and people spreading the truth about global events and issues is a threat to the powerful. That's why I really don't bag on "slacktivists" anymore. I'm not saying there isn't SOME truth to the notion that people reliably pick the one kind of activism that doesn't require getting off the sofa, it's a fair critique. However even that kind of activism is now heavily policed around the humanitarian crisis that won't be named.
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
There's no meaningful difference in my mind between "there are no laws" and "there are technically laws but they're completely unenforced".
There's a lot of that going around in the US these days.
And everywhere else, honestly. It's not like banner ads on the web are particularly honest here in the EU/EEA.
I was referring specifically to, "laws not being enforced".
Both the EU and various EU/EEA members have laws related to misleading advertising on the books which seemingly aren't being enforced either.
Whoosh.
You're gonna have to explain yourself, because I'm not getting it.
The difference in the comments here and in this other thread are interesting :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45424888
(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)
*no enforcement any longer. Back when we had Lina Khan at the FTC, she would have enforced it. Now we have a scammer-in-chief only enforcing laws against his political opponents
She started enforcing it against the most egregious offenders, but for every enforcement action, there were thousands that went unpunished. The problem is that FTC proceedings are very process heavy by design, which is what you want in some cases, but doesn't scale to widespread scam. We need to be prosecuting hundreds of thousands these cases every year if we want to make a dent and turn things around to fraud being a rare exception rather than a normal business model.
I agree the current administration is way worse than the previous one in almost every respect, but to argue that the previous one would’ve enforced this particular thing is obviously untrue.
The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
Not fake ads, but Biden's FTC did go after fake reviewers and fake reviews: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-ftc-fina...
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
Agreed - I think it’s lack of resources. Congress would need to act to fix this.
It's not even that there's no enforcement... you could talk to your state's AG. But their budgets aren't infinite, and the scammers are overseas as likely as not. Unless the scam rises above some (absurdly high) threshold or threatens someone very important/wealthy, it's going to be back-burnered.
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
Google Tag Manager is a malware vector. It's very design is to distribute non-Google code through a supposedly trusted source. They are part of the problem and JS blocking is the only dependable safeguard.
It'd be relatively easy for Google to screen out and filter ads... Charge enough when creating an account or starting/changing a campaign. Then you can pay staff for manual review. They could charge $1000 for account creation (half of which you get back after the first year), then they charge even $20 at campaign creation/change... They can even provide context/feedback, "Sorry, but this seems misleading, doesn't relate to what you are linking, is scammy, etc." And have an additional "check" of each ad and target after a day, a week and a random point within each month. Charge an additional minimum of $20/mo per ad for (re)validation.
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
But it would be a much healthier overall system.
Until management realises they can skip the checks and come out $20 on top each time, with no complaints from advertisers.
This is the motte & bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
My mail server easily gets the most phishing attempts from gmail. This is due to my unwillingness to blacklist Gmail. I report the abuse through there abuse page. The results in a slowdown while the abuser reformulates their sending process. I know this by watching the changes to the sending path in the header of the phishing attempts. The content and subject often don’t change but the header does.
I bet that if you were using gmail, those phishing mails would end up in your trash ... which raises the question: why does Google allow people who Google's own spam-filter can detect are sending 99% spam to keep sending e-mail?
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
As if people read only reuptable sites ...
> One is that "you shouldn't use an ad blocker, reputable websites have ads from Google and other reputable companies and they wouldn't be scams or malware".
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
I agree, I would be using an ad blocker even if all the ads were "only" annoying attempts at manipulating my behavior rather than scams and malware. But pointing out that ads can damage your computer or scam you out of money or information is a stronger pro-ad-blocking argument.
Genuinely curious: why do I always get scammy ads in iOS apps and Google products but I don’t see anywhere near the same amount on Instagram or TikTok?
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
IG, TikTok, Meta have a lot of data they can use to do good ad targeting that is harder to apply to Google/iOS apps. Also has to do with the ad format, placement, etc.
I get that but I’m surprised that Google doesn’t have that info too. Google’s ad biz is bigger than Meta’s.
Some formats are better than others. The Meta products comparable to GDN (audience network, various banner ad placements in its platforms) also kind of suck. Google wishes they had a feed based website, thats where people respond to direct respond ads in a big way.
When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
> When google switched off uBlock origin, it took less than a week for my grandmother to call me in a panic because she clicked on a malicious Facebook ad.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
She uses a super cheap Chromebook. Unfortunately I don’t think Firefox can be easily installed on it? I don’t think it’s even x86. It’s a very limited device, but all it needs to be capable of is loading Facebook and a few other specific sites- so it “works”
For me, almost every YouTube ad is a scam.
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 used to get SO MANY “heres how I make $6,000/day in passive income with chatGPT”. I reported am all, I know it never did anything
I wonder if reporting them gives them more engagement, since that would mean you watched it and paid enough attention.
From when I worked in the video ad industry, the industry standard was that an impression was binary and seeing a single frame of the ad counted. IDK if YouTube follows the Interactive Advertising Bureau guidelines, but they probably do. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xandr/industry-reference/i...
Quite a bit - I get ads for septic tanks because I have looked at them several times and tank companies continue to advertise for me because I might buy. I get ads for robot mowers because, again, I looked at them. I still see "the bottom of the barrel" ads occasionally, but it's very rare. Ad blitzes on the other hand ... (no, I don't want to build an app just-by-thinking-about-it) ...
At one point a few months ago, YouTube seems to have gotten the idea that I have some kind of bowel problem, and I'd constantly get ads about my "stuck poop." WTF? I'm watching a woodworking tutorial, I don't want to fucking hear about poop! Total bottom of the barrel.
Several months ago, my wife bought several bottles of pureed pumpkin babyfood, because small amounts added to catfood can treat some feline stomach issues.
Now, we're getting diaper commercials all over youtube. I assume we're flagged in some database as likely having a new child, but you can't ever know for sure.
https://myadcenter.google.com/personalizationoff
You can look up your Google ad profile and see if "pregnant" is one of your account's attributes. Facebook has a similar page somewhere.
FWIW, those seem to be a current ‘trend’. I’m getting them with personalization switched off.
Just remember, advertising is responsible for the rage economy. It's responsible for platforming misinformation. It's responsible for screen-addiction in children. It's responsible for online scams. Just think of all of the proposed laws and regulations around the world that are trying to counter each of these problems and remember that the root cause, and enabler of all of them is advertising. It's truly an amplifier of enshittification, and one of the worst conduits of bad social behaviour ever invented. If you're in the ad / ad-tech industry, please seriously consider the effect you're having on the world.
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.
Explicit (seriously, explicit) Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
That's a really good point. If the problem is the scammers, and they buy ads, then why won't they let us report it?
Because they don't want to drive off business.
It also doesn’t help that so many creators - even legitimate ones - now use injected ads that they don’t verify at all.
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.
Cool Zone Media podcasts kinda famously get farmed ads that run counter to their content. they claim they do what they can to influence that (ahem... Washington State Highway Patrol and all the gold scams come to mind) but i wonder if signing their souls away to ihm removed a lot of their agency in that regard.
and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
What an un-fun reputation to have!
I’m not even against pre-recorded spots by whoever the sponsor is if that’s his deal though the conversion rate on those are not as good. It’s just the completely random ads that the podcaster(s) don’t even know are playing on their show. The entire reason advertising on podcasting was more effective in the 2010s and early 2020s was because there was a little more trust with their listeners, there’s a relationship at play even if it’s parasocial. If they were actively reading on air, I assumed that they vetted the company and it at least passed the smell test (though plenty sure didn’t, I would say the bar was a little higher than other media formats).
If they post the episode on Youtube, download an audio stream of that file instead. No ads injected there.
where are the ads injected? I use a couple of podcast "apps" and neither inject ads, all ads in podcasts are explicitly put into the audio file by the people making the podcast, even pre-roll and post-roll ads.
> all ads in podcasts are explicitly put into the audio file by the people making the podcast
Yes, but those are dynamic too: if you go back and download old episodes, for example, you'll get the current run of ads.
No, that's incorrect. Not one of the podcasts i listen to re-master their mp3s, the checksums stay the same. In fact, most of the podcasts i listen to have no ads at all. I wonder if there's some misunderstanding, here. If i go watch like an LTT video where they had a sponser, 5 years ago, that same "native ad" will be in the video. I'm specifically saying that the podcast apps i use do not inject ads, but podcasts themselves will do native advertising, i consider these completely different things.
https://podcastindex.org/apps podcasting 2.0 app index.
Just to be clear, are you just saying the shows you listen to don’t do DAI, or are you doubting that DAI exists at all? I only ask because of your comment before the one I’m responding to here. It almost sounds like you think it isn’t possible or that no one does it.
a "podcast" is just an mp3 file, usually fetched by finding the URL via an rss feed. I am asking, perhaps a bit cheekily, "who is putting ads in", because that isn't a "feature" of podcasts. Stop getting podcasts from places that put ads in, support "podcasters" that don't do this scummy crap.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
I know what a podcast is, I have produced them for clients. I am honestly unsure what our discussion is about at this point.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.
Right? I'm confused. Saying "oh the ads are in the audio file" is exactly like saying that "the ads are in the html file."
It's not like the client app is inserting them.
I mean, I guess I can imagine an exceptionally-scummy podcast app, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Hosting services drop them in. You sign an agreement with them and they have agreement with advertisers who drop their spots into your show using DAI. Often it’s a straight up bid-system but the podcasters are not part of the process, or the podcasters can do the read and hand it over to be inserted. This means that podcasters in a lot of situations don’t actually know what ads are being run on their show.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.
when i use either of my podcast apps, it fetches an mp3 file (or streams it) and there's no additional ads (read this as "no additional non-native ads") that "change" when i listen again in a year. This means the podcasts that i listen to, i suppose, are not hosted on hosting platforms that inject ads. Because, as i think needs to be reiterated, podcasts are just mp3 files. you can host them with caddy, or nginx, or apache, all pointing at some file(s) in ./www/html/mp3/ One does not need to host it on "Acast" or other "podcast hosting providers", a podcast is just an mp3 file, which can be automatically fetched by anything that can download both rss and mp3 formatted files.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
That’s a (good) choice by the shows you listen to. There are plenty of ad injection services for podcasting, pretty sure Acast (popular hosting service) has it built in for instance. Search “DAI podcast” or “dynamic ad insertion podcast.”
The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.
> The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean and the people who buy ads for scams are the problem
Hmm. How are these people not part of the industry exactly?
> The ad industry likes to say that their industry is clean
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?
Websites get to control what ads are displayed. If a website integrates with Taboola they're explixitly opting in to these crap ads.
random question for you - do you still have your Dave Bull Great Wave and would you sell it?
It doesn't work for adsense as they basically get a new account every day so you can't effectively block scams.
Google can't figure out rate-limiting and trust-leveling/ramp?
Sure they can; it just slows the money-pipe
Google could but I was responding to "the website that integrates ads can".
What's YouTube's excuse?
They allow them, and people who have ad personalisation disabled are probably seeing more of them
Yes, but YT obviously doesn't use Taboola and it's still infested with scam ads.
I bet they tried an llm scam detector. It was too good so they didn't put it into production.
i can write that in like 2 minutes in any language you want.
There's a difference between "Need a tree cut down? I am licensed and bonded and cut down trees; call ###" and the sort of things that we all consider "ads". If someone can't see a difference, then that someone probably receives money from advertising.One of the few sorts of ads I'm okay with are those sort of ads for local businesses on the paper placemats at local restaurants. Those stick around and are seen by countless people so if it's a scam word will get around.
Well, that code would be over 95% accurate.
The YouTube situation is weird. YouTube is competent platform, and has some good content on it.
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.
Do you have watch history off? I have never experienced anything like this, but I pay for Premium.
Yes, I have watch history turned off. I suspect that gets me a different selection of ads.
Maybe it's a dark pattern to punish you for turning off personalization.
It seems plausible that if they can’t tie it to the user they have a batch of “garbage ads” that just run, cheap stuff that the worst kind of folks pay for.
They do select cheap ads if they don't have any personalization data. Companies who pay for targeted ads don't want to pay for impressions on users that don't meet their criteria.
The poo ads will continue until I comply I guess.
Advertisers are generally driving this. They don't want to pay any money for someone they can't target.
I've been receiving email spam from Derilla, a pillow company, for many years. Once the manifest V3 abomination went into effect in Chrome, I also have to endure it on the frontpage of YouTube.
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.
> Certainly not enough to fund all the ad supported service currently in operation through out the web.
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.
almost every ad is a scam, telling lies directly or indirectly maximizing what is within the legal bounds.
Having worked in the world of e-commerce, there are genuinely good companies run by good people making genuinely good products that no one knows about, and one of the ways they try and get people to know about their products is advertising. In one case, this is a product that replaced something already in your home, it's materially better, and it's materially cheaper in the long term. How do you create an ad for that that doesn't sound like a lie?
You have a curated directory of actually decent stuff, and you list the item there. Don't wrestle with the pigs.
What do you do with the other two wishes from the genie?
Whirled Peas could be one of them
And how do you get people to view said directory if they've never heard of it?
It's the way it used to be done with paper catalogues. If you're looking for a snowmobile then you go get a snowmobile catalog from a dealer who you looked up in a phonebook. But advertisers don't want to wait for somebody to decide they want a thing, they want to brainwash otherwise content people into wanting something they didn't previously want.
Consider that Hacker News does not advertise, and yet somehow you are here.
Hacker News does not advertise because it is a gigantic advertisement for YCombinator. This is not some sort of scurrilous accusation, they may not be constantly banging the table about it but it's not a secret.
I understand that, but the point is a good product spreads naturally.
Hacker News does not depend on me buying products from it for it's survival. If you can't see the difference in why a company cannot depend on word of mouth, then you're just really not trying to have an honest conversation.
Plenty companies don't advertise by shoving unwanted ads in people's faces.
There are plenty of companies I haven't heard of. QED
and yet they survive somehow
Many of them don't. Consider that BMW famously didn't run ads for most of its history... but now it does.
Many doing ads don't.
My dude, Hacker News is the ad.
This forum doesn't exist to get you to comment on news stories; it exists to attract tech people to YC.
Hacker News is as much an ad as a good product producing a happy customer
I think we're converging on "loss leader."
And how do you establish trust to curate it?
Come on. There is a massive difference between an ad that optimistically emphasizes the best aspects of a real product or service and an ad for a fake product or service that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
It's legal to advertise real products or services that will take your money and leave you with essentially nothing.
For example:
- gambling, e.g. slot machines, sports betting
- healing crystals
- palm readings
- carnival games
Perhaps the right distinction is whether something is legally a fraud or not. But I kind of agree that most ads are scams and also that ad networks don't have the ability to separate legal scams from fraud. So I just block them all.
Yes, these scams have aleays been there. The distinction was that advertisers like newspapers and magazines had a standards body that would reject ad placements that were insulting to their audience's intelligence.
I know television is not newspapers and magazines, but they at least had to have some level of standards bodies (I'm fairly sure they at least did in the early 90s), and I remember Psychic Friends Network ads on tv which is clearly in the realm of palm readings. I guess maybe it wasn't insulting to the intelligence of people watching late night TV in the early 90s?
I think the poster is lamenting the general quality of all advertised products in general. If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
>If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
what about iPhones? They're ubiquitous enough that Apple probably doesn't need ads to let people know they exist, yet every at launch ads for them are plastered everywhere. Same with soft drinks and cars, just to name a few. Before you say "iPhone sucks", the same can be said for basically all other phone OEMs, and if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable.
> if your theory allows categorizing an entire industry as crap, your theory is basically unfalsifiable
Or maybe, just maybe, the entire industry is crap and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.
>and so many people are complicit such that it becomes a self-sustaining problem.
If you're defining "ads" to be a "problem", then it turns the statement into a meaningless tautology. Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
> Only crappy brand use ads, because brands that use ads are crappy.
Hey, you're starting to get it, but not quite.
Only crappy brands use ads, because ads pollute my very valuable time, my very valuable window of vision, my very valuable hearing, and my very valuable sanity in trying to stay safe against malware hiding in advertisements. That's on top of wasting my valuable money convincing me to buy things that I don't want to buy.
If a brand really wants me to use their product, then make a great product and show off its features in demos, at conferences, and it will eventually get to me by word of mouth. One friend showing me how a product has improved their life is worth at least five-figure digit counts of ads shown to me, if not six-figure counts.
In the case of iPhones specifically--which I see a lot more ads for than appliances--people do upgrade phones a lot more frequently than appliances, especially major ones, often for specific capabilities like cameras. So reminding people they don't have the latest and greatest makes a lot of business sense.
I would guess that a company like Apple (or Miele or whatever) pays some attention to the context in which their advertisements appear. I don't think they'd want an advertisement for iPhone to appear online with a weight loss pill on the left and a gambling site on the right.
I should start by saying that I find ads incredibly irritating in any form. That said, Miele and DeLonghi are both more than a hundred year old companies. Maybe they don't need to advertise because they have such solidly establish brand identities, but they do advertise and they have advertised throughout their history as companies. Ads are a way of maintaining brand awareness, introducing new products, and creating demand. Even if you have an incredibly solid product with good word of mouth there is still benefit to advertising it.
Maybe. Stealing ad space from a competitor may be in itself valuable.
Another metric comes to my mind: if a newcomer has money to spend on ads, then it's a stable firm.
I'm sure there are more.
This is something people don't credit enough. How many times have you search for something by name and received a direct competitor's product as top result? This is why I put no stock in digital ads for the little guy. The bigger guy will always have a larger ad buy budget and will outbid you at every turn.
Two of the three names are unknown to me. This word of mouth delivery did nothing to make me interested in any of the three though. I have no idea what any of them actually do. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as how best to internet search "Henry".
All 3 are appliance manufacturers. Miele and Henry are predominantly vacuum cleaner brands.
Henry hoovers are ubiquitous in the professional market in the UK and well regarded for durability, performance and the cute face all their cleaners have. Essentially anyone in the UK will have used, or seen one be used
> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I'm guessing high-end appliance brands are enough of a niche market that it just doesn't make sense for them to advertise in relatively unfocused ways. You'll see plenty of ads for high-end appliances and cookware if you frequent gourmet-oriented websites and magazines.
Yes there is a massive difference, you are correct. Also, most of the ads do not fall into that category.
I remember back in the good old days (so like 2008) you'd visit the some bigco website looking for specs on some item and then later you'd see their products in your banner ads. Times were so simple back then.
I'm willing to throw that away to get rid of the scammy ads. It would be nice if there were ad networks that were vigilant about who they let use their service, but "money", I guess. So adblockers it is.
I agree there exist many shades of grey
50, actually.
There could be more! The title doesn't specify they're the only ones.
Right, the title also doesn't state the bit depth the color values are stored. There could be 64, 128, 256, 1024, 64million shades. Data Inadequate. I'm really surprised this was missed on this forum!
Seems like the ethical way to have ads on your site is to do it the way Costco does.
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.
there's not much difference between an ad that's a scam and an ad that's not, so many networks don't bother policing it much
This is the other side of ad tracking. Good ad tracking means much more relevant ads. The only advertisers that can afford to run on untargeted ad inventory are lowest common denominator products like teeth whitening and weight loss.
I use Mastodon for comments on one of my sites using a slightly modified version of the code featured here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
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.
I ended up going this route too and really like it. There are lots of guides out there with different solutions, all really easy to implement.
I also went this route. Also like it.
I just can't be bothered to have comments on my site. It adds nothing but headaches. Cross-posting articles to HN or Reddit for comments is a much nicer way, I think.
I like https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js - it is basically a global shadow-ban for everyone who comments…
Can't wait for the time when everyone is running an LLM on their phone so you can ask them to write their own rebuttals as well.
Data protection by design and by default.
This is so amazing that I wish I ran a blog just so I could run this.
Local storage gets erased at some point. Perhaps it takes so long that nobody notices.
It will last long enough for even the more determined keyboard warriors to get bored of arguing with themselves and typing in all caps YOU DON'T EVEN CARE DO YOU or similar…
TBH, I have considered writing a version (this isn't my work at all, yet) that does submit the blathering server-side so it looks like there is a useful round trip, but:
* I have more important projects awaiting the much fabled arrival of Free Time!
* While it could potentially keep an idiot “happy” longer, I'd have to mess around with some sort of login system to give the right people the right comments back, it couldn't rely on a just session ID as that would be as volatile as the comments in local storage.
* Taking in the data gives the possibility of DoS by extra routes.
* Giving back the data gives the possibility of the comments being abused as a Heath-Robinson-esk storage device!
I Love this!
This is hilarious, I love it. I've thought about rolling my own comment system for a blog and thought it'd be fun to have a local LLM decide if I should even see the comment to approve/deny or not. Could be fun to browse the rejected comments periodically.
This is so evil. I love it.
This is awesome!
This is so funny and genius
I use HN a fair amount. I often post articles here but I also feel bad about doing it because 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong. I think it might be good to cross post everything here and link to the HN comments for discussion. Is this frowned on at all? I always worry I'll get shadow banned or something for my 100 low vote posts. Here's the rule I worry about:
> 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.
> 1 or 2 upvotes makes me feel like maybe it doesn't belong.
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.
s/algorithm/dynamic/
HN doesn't have an algorithm, per se.
There are voting mechanics, and some sites gain or lose a penalty based on content or type (most generic news sites, for example, are slightly penalised). There are keyword / topic penalties too for issues that are dominating the hivemind for a period.
But mostly what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects, along with early-action advantage:
- Votes / article tend to follow a power-law curve, where the frequency of high votes is inversely related to the vote. This typically shows as a linear relation when the log of both values is taken (log(frequency) vs. log(votes)). There are 30 front-page slots on HN, about 11,000 opportunities per year (at day's end, more if you count intra-day appearances), vs. about 400,000 submissions (see: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>). Most submissions won't make the grade, often through no fault of their own. I've looked into this in some detail, including looking at votes/comments by story position (there's a sharp decrease here as well).
- A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect on the trajectory of a given story. Low-quality comments are particularly deleterious, and are hunted aggressively by mods for this reason.
- Stories often do far better on a subsequent submission. Part of this is probably randomness, part also a familiarity effect among those reviewing the "New" queue. If at first you don't succeed ... try again, a few times, at least.
- Stories can get selected (or nominated for) the Second Chance or Invited pools. These increase odds of landing higher on the front page, and are used fairly frequently. See "pool" <https://news.ycombinator.com/pool> and "invited" <https://news.ycombinator.com/invited> under "lists".
I don't understand the point of that first nitpick, this is an algorithm, at least in the normie sense of the word as a ranking system for list of posts.
> A small amount of early activity (upvotes, flags, comments) tends to have an outsized effect
This is exactly the problem.
> what you're seeing is simple mass-media power-law effects
I would challenge that point. Power law comes from some feedback loop, which is partially from network effects but it can be massively amplified by the system, which is exactly what HN does. Not only it bakes the power law directly into the score eqaution, but it also shows the list sorted by score by default, which creates a positive feedback loop on votes.
Actually I'm a bit perplexed that it works this well, HN algorithm was one of the first that I implemented on our site and it was quite terrible even after a lot of tuning. I feel like it must be tuned for some volume of posts and people, otherwise it doesn't make much sense to me.
In the context of social media, or more generally, user-submitted and user-generated content, which would subsume HN, "algorithm" is virtually always shorthand for algorithmic amplification, with an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures. And that is what HN explicitly does not have.
<https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-myth-of-the-algorithm...>
To the extent that HN does utilise specific procedural mechanisms to adjust the priority of content, it's virtually always away from the typical patterns of algorithmic amplification: less emotion, less outrage, fewer hot takes, less nationalism and relgious flamewars, and specifically toward "intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>.
It would be possible, yes, though incredibly disingenuous, to argue that what HN is doing is itself amplification. Yes, any curation is an amplification of some content over other, but in a world where "algorithmic content" means clickbait, brain-crack, and stickyness, HN is quite clearly aiming for something else.
Another facile objection is that HN fails to achieve its stated goals. Well, yes, it does, and the mods freely admit this (see, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20188101>). Why does HN fall short? Because the problem is hard (see, e.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16163743>).
If power-law dynamics were purely the result of manipulative algorithmic amplification, we'd see them only in online media subject to such amplification. And that's simply not the case. Power laws are fundamental to not only all of human communications and interactions (word and letter frequencies, for example, neither of which suggest a strong influence by algorithmic amplification), but to all manner of natural phenomena, including those entirely outside the realm of biological activity (e.g., frequency/magnitude plots of earthquakes, volcanoes, asteroid impacts, and stellar novae).
And in the realm of interpersonal online communications, HN's goals and interventions (mods, voting, and some programmed mechanisms) are desperately trying to swim upstream. As someone whose online tenure pre-dates the Web and extends to pre-Eternal September Usenet, HN has done remarkably well, and outlived many of its antecedents' and competitors' useful or entire lives (Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Google+, et cetera). Trust me, I'd love to see it do better (a view often voiced by mods as well). But in an ordinal ranking with what actually exists it's an exemplar.
This isn't a nitpick, it's a core and central point with (literally) universal applicability.
Honestly, I think this is quite naive view of the problem. The negative properties are emergent and emerge from even the simplest rules you can think of. Sort something by likes and you create feedback loop that incentivises attention seeking behaviour.
HN of course have all of these problems, just look at what we're doing now. It's in some ways better and some ways worse than others.
It's trendy these days to blame the algorithm or social media companies, but these problems are way more fundamental. Thinking that this platform and even you yourself is somehow immune to this is delusional.
> an end-goal of increasing time-on-site, engagement, addiction, outrage, and similar measures
Yea, again, this is naive oversimplification that's just been popular recently, but those are not endgoals and often go against platform goals. Outraged users don't click ads and increase revenue, they cause problems, drive other people away from the platform, same is true for the other issues.
As somebody who's been working on a social media platform for 7 years, I just can't hear this stuff anymore. Those problems exist, they are hard and much deeper and more difficult to solve than most people think.
BlueSky's ability to let you embed a widget and point it to a discussion seems attractive.
Yea, it's what modern blogs do. The discussions happen on social media and platforms where they are shared
This has disadvantages though! Often the threads on sites like HN/reddit get "archived" or lose traction and you cannot join the discussion if you don't happen to discover the article in the first few days of it getting published.
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.
Counterpoint, blog posts age; information or opinion from 10 years ago may no longer be accurate or reflect the author's held beliefs. Is it still worth discussing it then?
That said, I run old fashioned forums and some older threads get revived there from time to time with new insights. Others get flagged up by copyright holders under DMCA takedown threats or bumped by spambots though.
Not necessarily 10 years ago, you cannot comment on a HN post even from a month ago!
Why is that? Be good to join discussion from the past and bring back some zombie thread? No?
No. Re-post / start a new thread. Many times the old-threads will be cross-linked (I see this pattern a lot on HN)
Can we post one referencing previous HN link? ?
I've not seen it done but, what's a good one? Putnam award?
I wanted to add that some zombie/necro posts are useful outside the context of HN.
For example on retro computing boards it makes me so happy when someone bumps a 5 year old thread to share new details, benchmarks, etc. about some card or motherboard where the ancient thread is first thing that appears in search results.
Information which is no longer accurate is worth identifying or updating.
There's a lot between "few hours on hacker news" and "10 years"
Counterpoint: the last dozen it so times I've wanted to leave a comment on a website, I scrolled down to find that comments were automatically disabled 24hr/a week/year after the post was created. Nobody wants to deal with moderating comments.
> I just realised while writing this comment how much I miss web comment culture from the 00s.
Remember Shoutboxes? :)
Good point.
All roads lead to -Rome- the centralization of the Internet. Keep going!
But then people who find your blog can't comment on it without knowing the cross-post, and you risk spamming HN
Perhaps one could link to cross-posts from the blog? Maybe a "Discuss on HN" button. And the solution to avoid spamming HN is to avoid writing a large volume of low-quality content on the blog.
it usually ends up with either sugary sweet comments or comment wars; I agree 100%
I ditched Disqus for the exact same reason, too many ads
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.
The issue with that approach is risk.
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
Worrying about editing git history buries the lede. Any comment system allows users to insert data into your site, which, if it might be illegal things, is a legal risk.
and the wasted CPU and memory involved. Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system, it is overcomplicating it in ways previously unimaginable.
> Git is by no means a good design for a comment-system
I did try to implement partial-clone but failed
Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate.
It is painful for writing, but reading comments is quite fast and 99% is about loading.
> Let's be honest, for a personal blog, >1k comments is an overestimate.
Maybe, maybe not. Before 2024, my blog got <10k views/y. Then in 2024 it got close to 1 million (this year it will likely be 100k). Very hard to predict traffic thanks to hn and stuff!
> direct way for users to insert data into your repo
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.
I find the idea of using Git for comments somewhat terrifying, not least of all for the permanence of the history making moderation a nightmare.
They are just bunch of static hosted .jsonl text files, one comment per commit, and makes up exactly one line
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.
Your implementation might be static json files, but it's not impossible to force other filetypes in there. This in itself makes it high risk?
Allowing force-push is considered an antipattern for Git, and generally best avoided. It's a safeguard against lost history and prevents data loss.
That aside, the comments are the history. Git is the wrong tool for the job. Why would you choose a generic version-control system designed for source code diffs & merges for the specialised task of chronologically-ordered comments? A database such as PostgreSQL is a far superior choice in just about every possible way. I admire your ingenuity here to make something out of what's available, but I respectfully disagree with this being a good way to capture user-generated content when there are better alternatives.
.jsonl files are fine for low volume comment threads I think, but others have already mentioned the use of git for storage. Would sqlite or Cloudflare's own D1 (SQLite compatible, also available in their free plan) work as an alternative?
> Would sqlite or Cloudflare's own D1 work as an alternative
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
pardon my ignorance, but isn't there a solution that adds a Github comment box right below your post, and you comment directly with your Github account?
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)
> and you comment directly with your Github account
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.
I have done something similar with API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB. It is very cheap and doesn’t use Git.
"After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."
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.
I personally feel differently about the Pihole. I run one and it blocks a lot of telemetry traffic from smart TVs, apps like Netflix, etc. that are not originating from a browser. I'm showing a 23.1% block rate today.
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
> I personally feel differently about the Pihole. I run one and it blocks a lot of telemetry traffic from smart TVs, apps like Netflix, etc. that are not originating from a browser. I'm showing a 23.1% block rate today.
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 bought an apple tv box so I could disconnect my samsung TV from the internet forever. I think no matter what you do they will find a way to spy on you through your TV. I'm sure there are android boxes that will do as well as apple TV too.
One could argue however that the Apple TV box also spies on you. It is just more limited in its ability to be malicious because it does not have a microphone or a camera. But it is still a problem because Apple, like Google, has fingers in many pies (phones, email, file storage, watches, smart devices) and can build very detailed profiles of individuals.
I don't use "pi-hole", just an in-browser blocker (ublock origin) and am happy. But I would assume a "pi-hole" would be a useful addition to a household using a variety of potentially ad-infested devices e.g. a smart TV, various tablets etc.
The issue is that (some) smart devices are known to bypass local DNS servers entirely. They either use a public DNS server or hardcoded IPs. The best thing would be not to connect any "smart" TV to the Internet. These are closed firmware devices with cameras and microphones and they just can't be trusted.
> The best thing would be not to connect any "smart" TV to the Internet.
Agree! I regret letting my Vizio TV stay online for as long as I did.
At first it was fine, and I did get a UI refresh a couple years back that was OK.
But then some update caused it to start ripping control away from whatever my last HDMI input was so it could show me ads (which fails). Even though it's perma-offline now, it still messes with my inputs sometimes.
>bypass local DNS servers
There are easy ways to fix that at the router level, but DNS-over-HTTPS clowns ruined this.
I thought Pi-holes were supposed to block connections to blacklisted domains, not merely serve as local DNSs. Is that not what they do?
Spot on! My samsung TV menus are soooo much better in terms of snappiness by having Pi-Hole running and also setting up DNAT for those IoT devices who want to hardcode their DNS.
> DNAT (Destination Network Address Translation)
Yes! This is easy to do on OpenBSD as well, though it's called "redirect" instead of "DNAT":
I also redirect port 53 traffic, and in addition filter traffic to "well known" public DNS servers like 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9 and many others (lists can be found on GitHub), but this is ineffective against ads and telemetry served from hardcoded IPs.
Overall, it's just easier not to connect "smart" devices to the Internet at all. I prefer to use a Linux HTPC instead of a smart TV for example. It is completely under my control and I am not restricted to apps approved by Apple or Google, asked to log into anything or to accept ever-changing terms and conditions.
This config is surprisingly easy to read.
Is that right? Mobile is like 60% of the web traffic and they don't really have popular and effective ad blocking.
There are native, easily accessible ublock variations for Firefox for Windows, Linux and Android.
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.
Yes and it seems great but there's no denying its not widely used.
Okay, but what does it matter? The options exist for people who want them, nonetheless.
Because were talking about the current usage of ad blockers, not what options exist.
There are plenty of great adblockers on iPhone too.
iOS (Safari) also has uBlock now.
I run ublock in all my browsers and devices, but other people on my network (family) don't, so pihole helps there. Its really not an either-or question, they are complementary.
That seemed to me like a radically high estimate of people who use ad blockers. But I see that the first page of results on MyFavoriteWebSearchEngine support that claim.
> First, ad blockers running in the browser are simply more effective.
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.
> "After years with Pi-hole, which now blocks over a million domains, I’ve become incredibly accustomed to a mostly ad-free web. Without realizing it, I’d forgotten what the typical internet experience feels like."
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.
Wow thanks for the reminder! I have a small side project [0] with Disqus and got the email there would be ads but didn't think to check it out and due to ublock I was kind of oblivious to how they looked.
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.
[0] https://abx.funkybits.fr/
From conception, I've never wanted a comment section on my blog. I just put a line that in effect says "if you want to comment, you can send me an email at xyz".
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.
It's a bit sad that content creators, from individuals to big companies, have to (or at least feel like they have to) disable comments on their content, wether it's a video or an article.
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.
> my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section.
Besides the general issue with the assumption, what prevents you from using a non-distracting style instead?
I agree. Your blog represents you, so it must be fully curated by you. Others' opinions, you can always pull them manually into your website whenever necessary in whatever method and format you prefer. There's no reason to be bothered by random strangers injecting random things onto your own persona. They can always go to other communities if they seriously want to talk about your posts.
>my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section
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'm not in any way stopping you from having half your fun there, be my guest. I personally find internet arguments to be a waste of time most of the time, but the internet is wide enough to accommodate both camps.
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.
>I'm not in any way stopping you from having half your fun there
I mean, you are. You are adding friction to the process. If someone wants to talk about a post of yours they have find some forum where it would be relevant and link to it. I don't know what it looks like on your end. Maybe adding the ability to comment would be more effort than you think is worthwhile, but if it was as simple as a checkbox, you would still leave it turned off, am I wrong?
>I personally find internet arguments to be a waste of time most of the time
Of course it's a waste of time. So is blogging, as well as many other activities humans engage in.
>I propose to you that you should be in favor of a diverse internet
I'm naturally going to be for an Internet that accommodates the things I want to do, against one that doesn't (when it could), and indifferent about one that accommodates things I'm not interested in. I don't know what your blog is, so I don't want to comment on it, so I'm indifferent whether it gives readers the ability to comment, so I don't particularly care to try to convince you do anything.
But, I have felt that tiny bit of frustration when I read or watched something and scrolled down to see what people said about it and saw there was no comment section, either by design or omission. Sometimes that has been enough to disengage me from the thing in question.
I like the way Mark Seeman (ploeh) handles blog comments. He asks users to open a PR[0] with a comment on the post. Obviously the volume of comments is very low, but it sure is effective at targeting the right audience and keeping the bots out.
[0] https://github.com/ploeh/ploeh.github.com#readme
I did the same. I was sad to lose the comments, but the ads were awful and I don't particularly want someone elses ads / tracking on my hobby site. I switched to gisqus [1], which is powered by GitHub discussions, which seems to be working ok. (The site is hosted on GH pages so seems reasonable to also use GH discussions for the comments.)
[1] https://giscus.app/
I was so hopeful for Cactus.chat built on matrix, but like all products built on the matrix protocol, you have to follow their mantra of being unusable and undiscoverable. The main page for cactus chat even quit hosting the JS file and none of the maintainers think that's a problem lol.
Still a cool comments product and I still use it on my blog.
https://cactus.chat/
Hmmm, wouldn't it just be easier to make a new room for a new blog and just call it directly from the web client end? Not e2ee style to support more clients?
I’m in the process of converting a Wordpress blog to a static site. We did have significant comment traffic back in the day so I did look into how to maintain comment functionality. I found Comentario https://docs.comentario.app/en/ which is a standalone comments engine that can be self-hosted and linked to the blog page. Single stand alone Go executable, SQLite database - seems dead simple and has built-in ways to migrate Wordpress comments.
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.
What are you using to convert Wordpress to static pages?
https://github.com/ashishb/wp2hugo
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 :)
Removed Disqus from my website after getting huge spam waves (not the classic garbage spam but "real" comments, but for completely different sites, like they were intended for other sites but instead posted to mine. They were all from a few days old accounts). I wish I'd have used the built-in WordPress comments from the start but well, it was a different time back then. Related: I've used WordPress Jetpack Stats until they extorted every free website, no export possible. Would've cost me 200 € per year, that's more than I pay for my website. Switched to self-hosted Umami but 10 years of data just gone.
As far as alternatives go, there was an interesting post a few weeks ago on using Bluesky as a commenting platform. It improves discoverability and adds a social aspect to comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164
I’ve also found HN to be a great commenting platform too.
There are similar¹𝄒²𝄒³ ideas for Mastodon / ActivityPub:
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...
here's a similar implementation for Bluesky that I whipped up sometime back.
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.
I haven't tried them on my own blog yet, but on blogs I read, both the Bluesky comments you linked and this mastodon comment system:
https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...
have been pleasant.
I use Hyvor Talk - https://talk.hyvor.com - for ad-free and privacy respecting commenting on my blog. I really wanted something that I can just use as a service, not host anything myself. But it's quite expensive.
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).
12€/month minimum, that's expensive. It's ok for a professional website with loads of comments but for my personal blog, I'd rather not have comments.
If you are a small personal site, you can request a free upgrade to the Plus version (which can remove ads) by emailing publisher-success@disqus.com and asking. I did this in late 2023 and got a response in two days. This does remain an absolutely horrific business practice.
This constant difference between the original title and its censored version contributes into the whole impression (this, plus the lack of any moderation log) into the whole community to be very much censored and demotivates me to be here. Which isn’t a bad thing for me personally, the domination part, but the censoring part for no reason is quite disturbing.
Why not keep the original title? Rhetorical question.
In this case, keeping the original title would allow you to be better connected to the reality. But this is not what some actors want - they want you to stay disconnected, and thus easily "influenced", to put it mildly.
i agree with that and it keeps happening without sense or meaning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45141483
That, and aren’t we at the promoted publications at the front page yet?
Sometimes my iPhone changes words in a way I don’t see it before I press the reply button, it feels. The word domination had to be motivation.
Disqusting is the copious amount of trackers they inject in the websites.
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.
> Disqusting
Bravo for this banger of a new word.
I think the concern of "blog comments" is best left to external platforms eg HN, Reddit etc
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?)
There used to be a time when comments were attached to the posts. Where anyone could come, leave their name and a comment, and let the author know if any edits, misspellings, or how they liked the article.
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
> Also, the author’s experience with seeing scammy ads on their site doesn’t mean that others are seeing the same ads...
Well, so they may see worse ads.
> 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.
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.
Correct. Site owners moved their communities over to social media pages because they couldn't handle moderating the waves of spam comments that littered every single post on their site. They figured, let Facebook/Twitter handle moderation. Then FB closed the gates, de-emphasized posts with outbound links and now site owners are screwed.
Yep. Thats 99% of the culprit.
There used to be discu.eu: https://web.archive.org/web/20250523181311/https://discu.eu/
For those of you stuck with this issue reading this, there is a nice open source commenting system I found on GitHub https://valine.js.org/en/index.html
Here is another one https://docs.coralproject.net/
I guess most people here use adblockers, i do too. But occasionally, i have to use the internet without one and i am absolutely shocked.
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 have an email address for comments at the bottom of my blog posts. If they can write me an email and it's something that contributes to the discussion, I'll include it in a comments section at the bottom of the post. For bigger discussions, cross-post to social is the way to go.
I like the idea of linking to a public inbox (i.e. an email inbox whose contents can be checked from the web).
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.
That's exactly how periodicals worked for a hundred years. A letter to the editor that is published in the next edition. That's how I always mentally viewed blogs and expected most niche sites to eventually do that. In fact, a local "neat things" blog was successfully doing that for quite a while.
For those on the consuming side, Privacy Badger in Firefox has been blocking disqus for years without fail if you don't like seeing comments on sites.
A few years back I noticed something similar and had to find an alternative, which I found in Commento, which is now unfortunately abandoned: https://www.davidbcalhoun.com/2020/ditching-disqus-migrating...
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...
Then you might find Talkyard interesting: https://blog-comments.talkyard.io — reminds of Disqus, in that it's threaded, best first (optionally). (I'm developing it.)
> 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?
When I was evaluating ways to add comments to my blog on GitHub Pages, I quickly passed by Disqus because it was a 3rd party service that I didn't trust for reasons like this.
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.
All centralized services will eventually present a variant of this disease and indeed almost all are already. Actual baseline improvement in technology requires fully decentralized software similar to bittorrent and it's ilk imho.
I like Isso: https://isso-comments.de/
The Web would be a better place without advertising. It might be smaller as well, but that's fine by me.
I think they'd just increase the cost of everything until you needed advertising, then. That's a trick they use a lot.
With very little fanfare Google added an "AI Mode" button next to the search which adds a much more competent question answering engine than those awful summaries that appear at the top of most searches. (On a yes/no question they often give different answers and the "AI Mode" is right)
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.
These look like standard disqus ads. Which is to say - like you see when you scroll to the bottom of a Breitbart article.
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.
Try using a Bluesky-based solution so that everyone owns the content?
I made Bluniversal Comments partly for this, but there are other Bluesky-based solutions out there if you prefer.
I've been waiting for someone to build a Disqus alternative on ATProto (the protocol behind Bluesky, Blacksky, Skylight, etc.)
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.
There was a post on HN a few weeks ago about natalie.sh replacing blog comments with Bluesky threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826164
I was inspired by that and wrote up my experience integrating with my Hugo based blog here: https://brojonat.com/posts/bluesky-hugo-comments/
Proof of concept: the best blog commenting system I’ve seen uses ActivityPub (to integrate with Mastodon). It’s utterly easy to use, and pretty seamless. I don’t know what it’s called or if there’s more than one implementation, but you can see this in action at jwz’s site and a handful of others.
I blocked Disqus locally on my computer via /etc/hosts many years ago. Reason is very simply. Because comments as genre is almost useless.
> comments as genre is almost useless.
Writing a comment that categorizes comments as a literary genre and then immediately argues that comments are useless is some meta level deconstruction. Kudos.
You are putting comments on HN right now. i guess not entirelly useless then?
> putting comments on HN [...] not entirelly useless then?
Comment systems are useful/effective when someone is paying the full cost of moderation.
If it weren't for the "almost," the commenter would be in serious trouble.
OP wrote "almost useless" which, by definition, is also "not entirely useless".
You are technically correct, best kind of correct.
I've found https://remark42.com/ works well with static sites, and has plenty of user login options.
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.
When the ads showed up I immediately put disqus loading behind a "load comments despite ads" button, and instead just had a static export of the comments loaded by default.
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 stopped to use disqus a long time ago. Instead I am using hugo2nostr to publish my blog post on nostr network. So, all nostr users can comment in their clients.
https://github.com/delirehberi/hugo2nostr
How big is the nostr network? Is it peer to peer instead of federated?
Nope, its working over relays and Nostr network growing faster than federation network. You can get more details on official site: nostr.org
That's the next best thing to P2P. I really like this design.
I'll have to dive in sometime. This interests me in a way that Mastodon and BlueSky do not.
Giscus is a cool comments management solution vis Github: It lets users auth through Github then posts comments as discussions under your repo. We use it here for instance: https://predibench.com/models
I like giscus too, it’s pretty neat. It makes a lot of sense for tech blogs since the audience likely already has a GitHub account. And the comments being hosted in discussions makes them easy to backup in case you want to roll your own comment system someday.
I don't know why but I never commented on a disqus blog, ever. Something about it makes me feel like the author didn't care too much about comment and gave us the IKEA version. No issues with it, works well, but it feels sterile.
I encountered a similar problem with blog subscription services: I was using "follow.it", which would handle subscriptions and send out an email when I have a new article. It worked fine until follow.it went spammy a few months ago, switching to emails that were mostly objectionable junk ads.
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.)
RSS
I provide RSS but many people want to subscribe to my blog through email. So I'm looking for an email-based subscription solution in addition to RSS.
I didn't notice this problem, but then I realized that as I'm using Brave browser ads might be blocked by default. So I tried in Chrome and still no ads. I'm using Jekyll for my blog so I wonder what's saving me from this issue.
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.
I took Disqus out of my blog back in March. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Disqus had started to feel quite icky. I exported 18 years of comments from Disqus and wrote a little code to include them in my static site generation process. Now I just stick a footer with an e-mail link (and Mastodon thread link, if there is one) on each of my posts on the website and RSS feed. I get few comments, anyway, so I'd rather not subject everyone to all that tracking and ad nonsense.
Mailing lists are still the superior format.
The barrier to entry is a feature and not a bug.
The barriers to comfortable use are a bug, though
Sounds like you need more Emacs in your life.
This post was written in Emacs.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't a self-hostable, open-source JS injected comment system similar to Discus available. For me, I'd like to stay as close to SSG as possible for blogs, and only load comments on-demand for users. Just to give the best initial impression of the content. One of these days I'll finish out my setup and get back into blogging.
I used to use Disqus on my blog a long time ago, but dropped it with one of the many reboots. Having comments on a blog still seems like a good idea but I'm still half minds over on-page vs fediverse-based discussion, or maybe even both. Spam is a constant problem.
One alternative I've come across while researching this was https://cusdis.com/ - has anyone tried this?
Looked good but it seems this comment single-handedly crash them?
Also the project does not seem active.
Disqus is a great idea turned into hot garbage by (inevitable) lowest-level monetization. I once worked on a blog with Disqus. Whenever we had a hit, such as an HN front page, horrific ads would be injected into the comments section for that page. Any page without significant traffic had no ads, lulling you into a false sense of security. If a page 'hit' in your off-hours, the ghastly and repulsive ads could be running for a day, or even a weekend.
They could be turned off at the time but only on a case-by-case basis. In the end, I got rid of Disqus.
When it was released there were no ads at all, and it was a great way of quickly adding comments to your site. Of course there is no thing as free lunch so the enshittification was inevitable
There is a free lunch - see all those FOSS commenting systems.
Disqus was openly bragging about how many people they were tracking and data-mining from day 1.
Same here. I removed Disqus a while back due to how obnoxious it became. Then, I built my own commenting platform and, while it was a fun thing to do... I think it's worthless. People don't comment on blogs anymore, and when they do, the value is too low. Discussions happen elsewhere now. I've been tempted to just remove the comments altogether but haven't gotten to it.
I've enjoyed the comment system on https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/oss-maintainers-guide-to-saying-... which seems to pull from Hacker News and Bluesky when the author has posted the article directly.
I have disqus on several sites. No ads so shrug?
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.
There are a number of websites I like, like https://quoteinvestigator.com/ but I'll never send links to them to people that I think may not have ad blockers (my Mom on her iPad, etc) because the non-adblocked experience is so awful.
I suspect 99.5% of blogs like this don't make any appreciable amount of money from ads. Which begs the question, why even do it? If it cheapens your readers experience and you are not making significant money from it, just don't do it at all. Everyone thinks their blog will make money, few do.
Where in the blog did you get the info that the author wanted to make ad money off their blog?
Maybe I'm just lucky but looking at special interest blogs I appreciate the comments from other users/experts/makers. Diqus is the latest in a string of commenting tool and they all seem to have issues over time. A favorite blog resource of mine got nuked after the comments were filled with spam, and possibly used to hack the site. Unfortunately the blog was a collection of years of specific experiences in places with very little other information for that activity. I've talked to the owner about getting information in the years since and he's been helpful, but building the site back would take too long for him, so it's mostly gone. The comments there were useful for updates from people who visited those locations, or found alternate routes/approaches.
Same. I bit and upgraded my account to get rid of the ads. But it still didn't feel great using their software, so I just built commenting into my site after switching from static site to a fullstack setup. They made it difficult to cancel the subscription. I had to send an email to cancel it... like what?
I was in the same boat and built my own commenting system. It has an importer for disqus (so you don't lose your old comments) and also imports Mastodon replies.
https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/26-meh_another_comme...
You can use github for comments, I had implemented it on my blog earlier. Currently removed the section completly. Here is an example on this site.
https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/github-discussions-blog...
The catch: OAuth login will "Act on your behalf"
Which means complete control of all your github account.
I keep using isso https://isso-comments.de/ I installed it on my static blog very easily, and I own all the data. Also it is GDPR-compliant (because it provide hints on how to remove data like IPs) and it is very light. For me Disqus and similia are a dead end.
Looks very nice. Thanks.
I removed Disqus 7 years ago when I noticed their Javascript+HTML embeds ballooned my 75kb static blog into 3mb+ with sluggish loading times. It also failed every Performance test like Chrome Devtools Lighthouse Perf Tab.
We need to ruthlessly audit third party deps for privacy, perf, spam etc.
Improving performance, and removing ads is the way to go.
There is FOSS option built on nostr you could explore called nocomment. https://github.com/fiatjaf/nocomment.
License is public domain.
If people want to write comments provide an email address to send comments to. You will get better comments this way.
You still need comments on your blog. I hate having to log in to Twitter or HN to leave a comment.
Ugh, i feel u. Disqus ads have gotten way out of hand. It’s such a shame because the platform used to be so clean and user-friendly. It’s almost like they’re trying to ruin the experience. Definitely time to ditch it for something better. Any better alternatives?
For everyone saying "just have the comments on social networking sites" - that fragments the conversation, makes people sign up to a service if they want to comment, and exposes them to ads on 3rd party sites.
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.
Unless you're famous enough that everything you post gets to the top of Google, no one will read your content unless you post it to a social media platform with a curated audience. Literally no one but bots and AI crawlers. I mean, you have a whole list of crossposting links at the bottom of your own blog posts, including to HN and Mastodon, so you clearly understand. You wouldn't lose anything by limiting comments to just those curated social media platforms except spam and bots.
Looking through my recent comments, the majority are from people filling in the box on my posts. So, yes, I would lose a lot if I switched them off.
You'll also notice that I use WebMentions to import those 3rd party discussions (or links to them) into my blog.
That way users aren't subject to the advertising on platform A, the poor moderation on platform B, or the difficulty of even finding the comments on platform C.
I was actually going to suggest importing comments from a Fediverse account like Mastodon as a solution to that problem but I saw you were already doing something along those lines.
I'm trying Mastodon comments on my own blog, that I'm not posting here because it isn't really ready, from my own Mastodon account. I'd never even consider public comments anymore, it just seems like inviting trouble.
I won't have anything to do with ads, on principle- I realize this removes a potential income stream for me, but I don't care.
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.
I wish there was a Git way of commenting even anonymously (not necessarily without auth). Then a site like this, written with Hugo, could keep all the comments and the moderation/spam could be built in with a GitHub authorization.
Shameless plug but I built https://blogmate.io/ with Elixir and Phoenix LiveView for this exact problem.
It's disgusting what the internet has become, in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads, not that that would justify it. And then you have companies like Google who will punish you intentionally for using tools to reduce the amount of spam you're exposed to on your own device.
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.
> in this case it's even more egregious that the author as far as I see isn't even making any commission off of these ads
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.
It's like that episode of black mirror where if he shut his eyes to the ads it would start yelling at him.
Episode is called million merits. Sits one of the first season and yes, Charlie Brooker was always on the trigger.
If they could, you absolutely know they would.
Based on this article, I decided to remove comments from my blog as I was using Disqus too.
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.
I didn't realize Disqus is still alive. Yeah, there's no use in embedding things like this if it doesn't even bring in the traffic. You gained 0 and they gained 100.
I forget what HN linked blog post it was, but I noticed a bunch of ads on a website, and realized it was all from Disqus. It's a shame because it looked like the website owner had them setup.
I strongly recommend not having comments on your blog at all.
Disqus has been dead for years. Haven't seen it used on a legitimate blog or news sites since it was bought out. This was kinda expected. It's the Digg rot at work.
Thanks! I just disabled it on my blog after reading your post. I hadn’t realized how bad it was because of my ad blocker. Truly disqus-ting...
You're using an free tier supported by ads, what would you expect?
Either pay the money they ask if it's worth having comments, or build your own system.
I tried we mentions for a while, but then switched to just POSSE (publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere). So the comments are moved to other platforms atm.
*webmentions
That's a great step forward. But: he says he wants his users to be free from unwanted tracking, yet still has google analytics installed.
A comment system on top of the AT Protocol seems like the way to go.
I don't think anyone is surprised by this.
I don't know why a $5 VPS and a random CMS isn't the default for developers blogs. Dead simple, runs for years without maintenance, minimal cost, no ads.
Comments are the only functionality of a blog that require write access to a backend, without comments a blog can be a simple collection of static files. Any write access to a backend exposes the blog to potential vulnerabilities, requires the backend to be kept up to date. This is not dead simple and does require maintenance. Updating is not trivial if a version of a backend becomes obsolete, you need to dedicate time to migrate your backend to new versions to stay secure.
If you really run it "for years without maintenance" then your blog will get taken over by attackers and used to distribute malware or worse.
Indeed, the problem isn't necessarily even the site being taken over. There was an example of what happens to comments over a period of 9 years without anyone dealing with spam on Hacker News just the other day.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370971
Well, back in the day this lead to thousands upon thousands of vulnerable WordPress sites
False equivalence. That the creators of various PHP blogging platforms sucked at security does not invalidate the poster's point that a self-hosted CMS with a simple comment system is indeed much simpler and easier to reason about.
I suppose it's rather the "without maintenance" part. Had everyone updated their WordPress sites the problem would've been much less.
The wordpress core can be kept up to date but the vulnerabilities from plugins, relying on fixes and updating plugins i think was more the problem than the core.
In the 2010s if you left a wordpress blog unattended even with the official default filter plugin it would fill with spam comments. I dont know if thats still a problem.
My own blog - which gets maybe a couple of posts a year these days, and almost no audience - had 59 spam comments so far today. It really is time I turned off comments.
Without comments it's much simpler and cheaper than a $5 VPS and a random CMS, with comments it's much complicated and expensive than a $5 VPS and a random CMS.
I've been using self-hosted Isso to serve comments on my static sites. It's worked well enough, it's practically the same as Disqus.
The author is using a random CMS, namely Hugo.
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.
Me too, there is no need to have comments I feel you can have a feedback button at most if you want it.
Once you add comments you have to add a database and anti-spam measures. Not so simple anymore.
Edit: And for other similar services, blocking ads or using DNS solution that block ads it will refuse to load the comment section.
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-...
There was once a time when advertisers had to show some creativity in their ad copy to develop brand recognition and stay within the editorial guidelines of magazines and newspapers.
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.
Enshittification is everywhere, unless you own your stuff. I know it's easier to use a third-party service, but please, consider hosting your own content to keep full control over it.
Does hosting it in wordpress count?
Utterances: https://utteranc.es/
> No lock-in. All data stored in GitHub issues.
No lock-in, except for GitHub, I suppose.
That requires a GitHub account, which most readers on most blogs won't have. Moreover, I'm pretty sure most people (>50%) who would have commented, probably won't do it if it requires creating an account for an external service first.
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.
Came here to recommend that as well.
Or just leave it. Nobody needs to comment on blog posts, really. :D
Blogs with comments should just be forums.
I had a similar incident with Disqus. But I didn't even know they were showing ads on my website because I had Adblock enabled. Until a user without adblock emailed me. facepalm
> With this post, I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse, and frankly, they were profiting off my work and my visitor’s data.
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.
The 'Subscribe', 'Privacy' and 'Do Not Sell My Data' buttons are still part of the Disqus wodget
In terms of blogs, for selfhosting comments, the main ones that seems interesting for selfhosted setups are probably remark42[0] and utterance.es[1]. Remark42 is a low barrier Disqus clone with social logins (as well as just plain usernames) that also makes it fairly easy for users to bulk export their own data (as well as delete I think?), which ought to take care of most GDPR stuff.
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/
Haha lol it's a chumbox. That's wild.
Ah, color me shocked that capitalism leads to enshittification over time. Why would people embed a for-profit third party platform in their Web 1.0 site and let them do whatever they want? Because they don’t have the software to do “social” Web 2.0 stuff themselves.
Perhaps there should be an open source alternative. Why isn’t there one by now?