Nobody is entitled to spew their opinion from my site. They can post their own take on their own site. They can send an email, and I will amend a post or write a new one in response where necessary.
I wonder why link spam still exists even though search engines no longer use the number of links to a page as a ranking factor — at least not in a way that would allow people to get their stuff to the first pages with link spam. What is it that makes link spam an activity worth the effort?
Even if link spam is less profitable, unsecured comment fields are also sometimes used for malware command and control. Nowadays you often see spam comments that are just full of strings of digits.
If someone shared one of my blog posts here? Not really. My account of my last trip, or a description of my D&D campaign, or a link to a tool I made are only public because I see no reason to hide them.
If people have thoughts on these that's fine, but they don't matter much to me.
While I don't like comments too, I'm pretty certain that majority of my site visitors are unknowns (random people) and I'm interested in what they think, otherwise I would have shared it only with known ones (non-random people) but then it would have been not an internet blog, maybe an email message to them. That's being said, I encourage random people to email me their thoughts or comments when possible.
Yes this is the tragedy of the commons, yours is the right approach. I used to run my own blog with comments and so on... the occasional good comment (that could be an email) becomes absolutely outweighed by having to deal with idiots and spam.
This isn't about the entitlement of others, it's actually quite the opposite.
By not having comments on your website, you're outsourcing those comments to other platforms, denying yourself a community around your blog, or the opportunity to control the conversation (since you can just delete rude comments), and that's one reason for why your blog is dying, alongside the rest of the indie Internet, because people have moved on to the closed gardens that have comments (and that are now downranking posts with links). Static blogs with no comments has been a poison for blogging.
I have more thoughts on my own blog, ironically, this one with 0 comments:
By not having comments on your website, you're outsourcing those comments to other platforms, denying yourself a community around your blog, or the opportunity to control the conversation
I'm not asking to use any other platform. I'm not interesting in having a "community" around my blog specifically. The "community" I care about is called "world wide web".
That said, different people, different goals: If you care about capturing an audience and call it community, go wild. The prescriptive tone of the blog post ("should have"), however, felt like overreach.
By the way, I think it's weird to both want a community while also wanting to control the conversation: I might just be too anarchist to grant myself the ban hammer of conversation control over a community I supposedly plan to build.
The conflation of a captured audience with community is really common in these spaces, and it always makes me sad the way people view interaction with others. Real community is very different than having the same posters come in consistently and is something that is often built, and building it around yourself strikes me as something I really don't want. It feels like an extension of the "building a personal brand" and treating other people as engagement to farm style of interactions on the internet that I think is actually what got us to the world we have now, not the lack of comment section.
Kind of off topic, but I like your inclusion of a periodically rotating email address. It lets you avoid most of the spam (I hope!) while giving readers a proper mailto: link if they want to send a private message.
Oh, DEFINITELY not. My blog is my happy place and programmers can’t agree about anything.
Plus, communities form around aggregators. Lobsters is totally different from HN, Reddit, various Discords, etc. I like the focused discussions that come with each.
Your blog is your happy place, sure, but if your blog ends up on Lobsters, HN, Reddit, you're going to read and reply to the comments there, anyway, without any way to moderate them (other than complain to the service's moderators).
Also, in my experience, the visitors on my blog are aware that it is my blog, so I've gotten very few comments that are rude. It's like visiting someone else's house, and you don't make rude comments while you're in that house. And the very few rude comments I got, I deleted them without shame. By comparisson, Reddit or HN comments at least can be very rude, while also using a passive aggressive tone that's hardly banned by any of these websites. Which is why it's quite common to see complaints of authors with websites reaching the frontpage of HN (but they participate anyway).
It's like visiting someone else's house, and you don't make rude comments while you're in that house
I guess you've never been on the internet?
I don't want to be involved in content moderation whatsoever. I want to have a history of the things that I've written, with zero extra information. Whatever people want to say outside of that is none of my business.
I've been on the Internet since ~1999, and have had an actively maintained blog since 2008 — not very popular, but I'm pretty sure that it gets more traffic than a majority of Jekyll websites.
I totally agree with the sentiment, but the economics is not in favor of that: you have to deal with moderation, potential security incidents and of course GDPR.
So the part I don't agree with is "it's not hard to host, it's uncomfortable to host". In my opinion it's more like "expensive to host". Expensive in the sense of quality attention. Someone could post illegal content in my comment section 24/7. They could to it when I'm on vacation, sleeping, in a meeting etc.
It's not even that we should not actually be responsible for such things. It's just that there is a lot more than just blog comment sections that I have to monitor frequently in 2026...
If you mean "pre-moderation" as "don't publish comments without approval", then I agree completely.
However, at that point, you might as well put an email address in your blog- it will have a similar effect.
(I moved my blog to a static website some time ago. I had very few valuable comments, so I didn't even bother preserving the comments. Instead, I put a footer on each post that reads "mail me at x". I occasionally receive some emails, and my feeling is that it's worked so much better than a comment box.)
I think many ills of the modern Internet are solved by not publishing comments without approval. I feel even Mastodon doesn't allow this well, and I suspect it would help so much...
that is actually a pretty decent solution, if you only get a small number of comments. Still, I'm not sure if it's possible to do it without GDPR.. Perhaps if the comments are fully anonymous?
This is simple — make email non-mandatory, with people providing it just for getting notifications on replies, if they want to get notified. Consent for your system using that email is given due to the UI, with no extra steps required, as people give you that email to receive notifications for replies, and that's what you use it for. This is like a Home Pizza Delivery service — obviously, to deliver pizza, you need your customer's address, the customer is aware for why you're asking their address, no extra consent is required (unless you want to also deliver periodic ads or do something else, apart from delivering that pizza).
Note, the Isso commenting widget has optional emails, needed just for getting notifications.
That's a simple DELETE FROM users WHERE email = ? and in all my years of blogging I have never gotten such a request.
I think people think that GDPR or ePrivacy are more complicated than they actually are. If you don't do spyware shit, and just provide functionality that the visitor wants/expects, you basically don't have to do much, if anything. Consent and cookie banners show up all over the place because the vast majority of Internet companies deploy spyware at scale (e.g., Google Analytics, ads).
yup, email is the main problem, and even IP if your login system collects that (which I guess is wise to do).
Another problem is what to do about bots and whatnot trying to abuse the system. Once you add an external captcha provider for that, you will also need to add a cookie banner I guess. (Albeit it would be enough to do this for users who actually want to log in)
Maybe you could add a completely anonymous commenting system that does not log IP or email, and use some cookie-less captcha solution. But that might not be very fun to use.
It is often considered a legitimate interest to collect the IP adress for abuse prevention, if the storage duration (log rotation) is short, as it makes the impact less for the user, and thus makes it easier to meet the bar.
I don't really understand legitimate interest. It seems like every ad tech platform under the sun has a legitimate interest to track me? And I can object to it, but sometimes I have to object to each of their 5000 ad partners individually? How does that make sense? Would a blog need a button to let users object to the comment system's legitimate interest in storing the emails of commenters?
Ad tech is not a legitimate internet, and those companies are making illegal claims. The problem that EU countries have is that Data Protection Authorities are understaffed, overworked and move too slowly.
Logging IPs for security purposes is a recognized legitimate interest, so it's fine if your Nginx server has those logs, as long as you rotate them and don't keep them around for years.
Well yes. Some companies may stretch it too far and go beyond the letter and intent of the law. The proper way is to weigh the interests of users against the company's goal, and sometimes the conclusion will be negative.
The biggest bottleneck and weakness of the GDPR is the enforcement. In a perfect world, someone will report the practice to a supervisory authority, and they would swiftly issue penalties. But that is not the case, so a lot of companies get away with clearly illegal practices.
Edit: Some of the things a company should consider when determining legitimate interest are:
which kind of data: an IP address is less sensitive than full name or financial history
how long is the storage
what is the data used for? Is it connected with other available data (cross tracking)
what is the goal? Is it aligned with the goals of the regulation or recitals?
Can the goal be archived without the data or through consent?
could the data collection harm the user
etc
Edit 2: Another principle is that you can't switch your lawfullness basis (consent, legitimate interest, etc) if you first based it on consent and then the user withdraws the consent. So the banners with two buttons: consent and legitimate interest prechecked makes no sense. If I don't consent, then legitimate interest can't ever apply.
The request for deletion thing really worries me. What if a user can't "prove" that they are who they say they are? Do I have to understand my legal obligations with respect to account recovery now?
Personally I'm ready to debate in court that thisisalex@example.com is not in fact personal information because there can be a myriad of Alexes that can have that email address. Additionally I would assume that a blog that probably results in negative income qualifies as:
In a case of a minor infringement or if the fine likely to be imposed would constitute a disproportionate burden to a natural person, a reprimand may be issued instead of a fine.
And how does it personally identify someone if I have no other information of theirs ? From my perspective I think it's an argument worth making in court.
Also I find it amusing that random blog people are getting worried about this type of GDPR violations when probably they'll fall in the very long tail of offenders, if even.
As a personal blog I imagine it's way easier:
Not to store emails in the first place, because you don't really need to.
To find specific emails in your storage and remove them if anyone asks.
Upon reading more about it, it seems like I was wrong to point out a difference between personal information and personally identifiable information. The GDPR seems to use the term personal information.
This quote from article 4 is relevant:
‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.
An e-mail must surely count as an "online identifier".
data held by a hospital or doctor, which could be a symbol that uniquely identifies a person
I don't think you can argue that a personal e-mail address is anything but personal information under the GDPR. Especially if the e-mail contains the person's name and surname, which many e-mail addresses do.
I thought I was pretty explicit about which emails I consider to be non personal identifiable information, I don't understand why you keep arguing with me.
What I'm trying to say is that for small websites worrying about emails being PII is premature optimization of the worst kind. Do your thing, and worry about GDPR when you receive your first request for removal.
So we agree that at least some of the e-mail addresses your users sign up with are personal information. Good. Your first comment seemed to dispute that.
Then you need to handle that personal information in accordance with GDPR. It's not something you can care about only after you get a request for removal.
It did dispute that in the context of emails being used as an anti-spam mechanism. So on the assumption that someone is commenting shady stuff on a blog, I am 100% sure they will not use an email that can identify them personally.
It's not something you can care about only after you get a request for removal.
Can you tell me why you think that?
For my personal websites, it most definitely is. First because no national org for enforcing of GDPR will go after a dude with a blog, second because when you have 100 comments a year on the blog, it's easy to remove/edit the idiots that used their personal email addresses and then had second thoughts to ask for their data to be removed.
I have been dealing with moderation, security and the GDPR for years, and the effort has been minimal. It probably depends on how big the audience for your blog is, but nowadays, a vast majority of static blogs with no comments have virtually no audience anyway.
I’ve been thinking that a basic moderation “pre-filter” might be something LLMs (even cheaper LLMs) could handle reasonably well. It would take off a huge chunk of the burden of human moderation.
I generally feel it comment fields encourage low-quality interactions. If you want to tell me your reaction to one of my blog posts, send me an email instead. Makes it far less performative.
Generally if a blog post is sufficiently interesting, it gets picked up on places like HN or lobste.rs, where there is (usually) a moderated discussion with high quality participants. You rarely get that in a comment field.
The author admitted it was written by an LLM in the comments. I'd link to that comment, but (and it's a pet peeve of mine) you can't link to individual comments.
It is, he used to only spam links to his own projects and then started posting links to other content once it became incredibly obvious. ~antonmedv may be the most successful marketer on Lobste.rs ever.
I've thought about integrating fedi comments several times but so far I never followed through. I post about one thing per year here if I really want am actively looking for feedback (I don't mind it, ever).
I had comments for five or six years and then realized a decade+ ago after looking over the comments I got that only one or two comments in all those years actually had anything worth saying.
If the content on your blog is valuable, people will discuss it anyway in various places where discussion happens. They will discuss it on Lobste.rs, HN, Reddit, Bluesky, Facebook, the fediverse. Everywhere where it’s convenient.
I’ve come to the conclusion that adding one more discussion outlet won’t concentrate the discussion in one place. Even when said outlet sits right next to the posts themselves and is ‘canonical’, that’s just not going to happen. On the contrary, it will just contribute to the dispersion of discussion.
They will discuss it on Lobste.rs, HN, Reddit, Bluesky, Facebook, the fediverse.
Yes, and that's bad, being one reason the indie web is dying, IMO, replaced by social networks that are now deprioritizing links in their algorithm, an algorithm optimizing for rage, because that's what captures attention.
Eh. In an ideal world I agree, out of nostalgia for the early-2000s blogosphere if nothing else. But in recent history, when I’ve had comments turned on for a while, two things happen:
90% of actually interesting discussion about a post happens on social media, and most of the remainder in person or by email
99% of the submitted comments on the blog itself are crypto-spam
I use pre-moderation, but it’s honestly depressing to scroll through comments to approve and find that all of them are spam, you know?
The dynamics of online discussion seem to have moved on. I know of a few blogs left with active comment sections, but they are mostly frequently-updated, long-standing sites that have accumulated a dedicated readership over years.
Whereas my blog is an occasional hobby I post to less than half-a-dozen times most years. [shrug] So I’m not inclined to try and build a regular commenting community around it.
My personal blog should have whatever I want and nothing I don't. One of my sites is on ClassicPress now and still has comments enabled, but it's not updated often, and even when it was, I got very few comments. Even when I tried to start discussions and desperately wanted comments. Occasionally I got weird comments that I was hard-pressed to think of an appropriate reply for. Like... okay, you've written ... something that I guess a person could think? Uh, thanks?
My other main blog is a static site with no comments, and I have no plans to add them. I post when I feel like it, and if anybody has a reaction to what I say, they can poke me on my Fediverse profile, email me, or write their own blog. It's not my responsibility to host their opinion.
I sympathize with the author having nostalgia for a blogging culture that no longer exists, but not the framing of telling people what they should do. It would've been better if they'd simply talked about what they missed about blog comments and perhaps the dangers of "outsourcing" to social media. But many folks just don't want comments; be glad they shared their thoughts with you at all. The entire world is your canvas to react to the blog post; it's not their job to give you space to do so.
Your piece stated my thoughts much better than I could. But relative to this thread, I think they simply represent two different ideas of the purpose of having a blog. For me (and it sounds like for you) my blog is about writing. I use it as a way to practice my writing more often. Secondarily, I use the act of writing a blog post to help me remember things I want to remember.
This post says "With comments, it becomes a dialogue," but that's not the goal of every blog, and not every blog needs that. I'm happy having the dialog in a separate channel (even linked to the post, if it's a public channel) but I don't need to host and manage the dialog. And your section ("Parce que c’est un gouffre d’énergie") about the ways it becomes an energy pit lays that out quite nicely.
I could see why someone would consider the exchange in a comment section to be worth the energy. But I don't find it to be so, especially if the time and energy associated with maintaining it means I write less. It brings Neal Stephenson's essay to mind. Even though my writing is nothing like his, at all, and not nearly as well-crafted, the productivity equation he cites there applies to having a comment section on my blog.
@antonmedv if you haven't read ploum's piece because you don't read French, it's worth running it through a machine translator. The argument is quite a bit deeper than "because static page generators."
I'm seeing a lot of replies from you reiterating your unsupported stance without any regard to the clear reasons others are providing for not doing what you say everyone should do. I encourage you to instead reflect on the information provided by others and take time to consider. Unless you're offering to personally address these concerns (moderation, complexity, spam, etc.) for each and every blogger, you really have no right to tell people to add comments to their blogs while ignoring their reasons not to.
From my perspective all of this debate makes no sense (that people are arguing with OP and also that OP is arguing back).
OP's framing is wrong IMO. Their post is for the people who set up their blog on a SSG and never got around to adding a comments section (why is sort of irrelevant, but they offer some options). This is surely a sizable audience: I am among them and I've seen many other SSG blogs sans comments. OP is telling these people "please consider adding comments!"
Instead, in this thread, OP is getting a bunch of people who had set up comments showing up and saying "Don't tell me what to do, I chose to take my comments down or not add them in the first place!" Which is absolutely their prerogative. But they aren't OP's audience.
I'm not saying that these peoples' opinions don't matter (nor that they shouldn't share them), but engaging with OP in this debate is kind of pointless because clearly they disagree with OP over the reason for adding comments rather than the feasibility. And yes, GDPR exists but it's a weird "um actually" drum to beat when your blog surely is not so large to render it infeasible to remove comments if you must (be it by hand or script).
Lastly, throwing around a claim like "unsupported stance" to make OP's argument seem meritless is frankly unreasonable and hostile. Are you expecting OP to scrape all of the blogs they visited, count which are missing comments sections, and guess why? They noticed what they believe to be a trend and offered a reasonable explanation for why that trend exists. What more support does this observation require?
OP has certainly had questionable replies to comments here, but we don't need to gang up on them for this, since to me it's apparent that they don't bear any ill will. Everyone seems to be talking past each other.
Unless you're offering to personally address these concerns (moderation, complexity, spam, etc.) for each and every blogger, you really have no right to tell people to add comments to their blogs while ignoring their reasons not to.
[Allow me be rude here] I do not care. And I will be telling people to add comments. I really do they make blogs better!
I translated Ploum's post. I get it. All people are different. Yes, I understand what you do not want to have comments. But maybe you do! And I actually got comments (even a email (!)) from people what my post was a motivation for them to try own-hosted comments! So I guess mission accomplished =)
This is just an assumption on your part. While I’m sure there are folks who don’t have comments because they just want to use a static site generator, it’s not the universal truth you seem to think.
Over two decades I’ve experimented with a range of discussion formats on my personal blog from a full wiki, pingbacks, comments, nothing. I settled on nothing because it suit’s my site better. Moving to a static site generator was an informed decision. I know I’m not alone.
I would rather shit in my hands and clap than put in the effort of creating and maintaining a comments system just so people can quickly and easily annoy me
Edit: also, parts of this sound like LLM output to me
The main reason I don't allow comments on my website is because I don't want to have to deal with the security implications of untrusted input. It's so much simpler for me as an administrator not to have to deal with possibly hostile users who could put CSS or or some hidden thing in my comment thing and then I'm fighting a war. I mostly make my site for myself. If other people want to read it, that's fine
Eh, I've done that, but the amount of spam that came my way is ridiculous. I got some nice comments from kind visitors, but most were spam. Casinos, porn, roofing and increasingly AI tooling advertisements. I have a CAPTCHA and I've added some filters, but life is too short to waste my time with this cat and mouse game.
I find great pleasure in maintaining an active comments section on my blog. My website isn't particulary high-traffic, so over the past 25 years it has accumulated only about 500 comments. Nevertheless I'm glad that people take the time to leave thoughtful comments.
I know many website owners cite spam as the main reason for disabling or avoiding comment sections altogether and I think that concern is completely valid. Spam is a real issue and I deal with it from time to time as well.
A simple trick that works for me is to never auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website is held in a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I delete all the spam and off-topic comments, and publish only the genuine on-topic ones on my website.
With comments comes moderation and fighting spam, I don't really wanna deal with that. Instead, I just have badges linking to external discussions, such as lobste.rs. Example: https://mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/
I think it would be fun to get Mastodon replies onto the page as a form of comment section. But I want to avoid a comment field on my website where anyone (or any bot) can spam links to their supplement pills or whatever.
I'll politely disagree. Blogging self-hosted since 1997. I started with Template::Toolkit and after experiments with different systems that supported comments, returned to static site generation and stopped accepting comments in any form circa 2009. The interactions were spam, spammy pingbacks, exploit attempts, or nearly content-free. I'm not building a personal brand around it, searching for an audience, and chasing engagement so it's not worth my time to deal with that mess. I write, maybe someone reads it, maybe no one does, it's good.
Just because I write something and make it available for people to read, doesn't mean I should be on the hook to enable someone else's discourse around it. That's pure entitlement.
Isn't putting it out there for others enough? You're not entitled to a "free" avenue to critique, dispute, or even agree for that matter with the subject matter or the way it's presented at the cost of my own time, and potentially money. If I write something i've put it out there, if you then take the time to read it, that's not me forcing you to do that in return for anything in some unspoken bargain or deal. There are plenty of places (lobste.rs, reddit, the orange place, etc...) where people can discuss and have a larger breadth of discussion than would ever occur in a comments section embedded in my site, and I don't want to have the opportunity to control and filter that discussion.
I would much rather spend more time writing and learning to write better, and researching things to write, than moderating and controlling the discourse around what i've written.
I don't even write that much but this got me triggered.
Also I can add that I was a very regular blog commenter during the high times of blogging and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times an interesting conversation happened in the comments of a blog.
A blog is not just publishing.
The most reasonable way to approach most media, social or otherwise, is to treat it as write-only.
I typically don’t want to add fields that users can add content to with a personal site if I can avoid it. That means I now need some sort of moderation and I just don’t want to deal with it. More power to those that like it though.
While reading, I wanted to say „but…“ several times, however it is nice writing overall and I also support the internet as P2P network of independent servers run by individuals and small groups rather than few big corporations and their global clouds. It is not only about distribution of technology but also distribution of power, sovereignty and resilience.
My blog is a place of curiosity, learning and fun. As soon as I add comments, I'm concerned about arguments and criticism, or why no one is interested enough to comment.
My posts on lobste.rs and the orange site don't draw much interest, so it looks like minimal gain for extra work.
I prefer to have Webmentions that alert me to being referenced on someone else's blog (or whatnot - shouldn't Mastodon support Webmentions?). Then I can have a look, and maybe update my post with a new section about the mention if I feel it's warranted.
My blog should be things I've written, and only that. IMHO.
Eh, I'll pass. My blog is currently hosted on Codeberg for a whopping 4 euros a year (which is not actually spent on hosting itself, rather just to rent the domain). It has zero moving parts, no databases, tasks, no nothing. I generate a couple HTML files using DThompson's excellent Haunt and I'm done.
Assuming I don't want a SaaS solution, the moment I'd need to add any interactivity, I'd need to switch to a VPS, change my static site to one with a runtime. It's just too much effort.
Not to mention, by publishing your content on various aggregators, you not only get comments by current readers, but also draw in a new audience with each post. POSSE is cheap, simple, and reliable.
I have a static site, and comments, and the ability to link here. I think it's the best of both worlds. I do want to see what people have to say about my writing, but I also want control over it.
Lots of negative feedbacks! I agree with the author: it keeps you honest. On an article about DNS, I've got a positive comment from Paul Vixie. This was nice and could be considered as a signal the article is credible.
Exactly! The whole point: is to find like-minded, in this chaos on negativity and aggression! Getting positive comments outweighs all the rude comments.
It doesn't work well if the personal blog have much traffic.
I think Hacker News or Lobste.rs solve this problem almost perfectly, we cannot talk with author directly, but we can talk with someone who is interested in this blog as well.
I don't think so; too much hustle + I would rather have discussions through mail and platforms like Reedit, LinkedIn and Lobsters. It's a nice separation of concerns, plus, if somebody makes a comment significantly extending, elaborating or correcting statements made in my work - I attach it to the original post/article :)
What is more, in the technical, intellectual discourse of the highest quality - friction is a feature, not a bug.
To add to that, maybe instead of saying people should carry the burden of maintaining comments sections on their own blogs we should instead say everyone should have their own blog. If you want to publicly comment on a blog post of mine, write your own blog post in response!
I see the appeal, but I already have a pile of partially finished blog posts, and only so much time to spend on my blog. I'd much rather spend that time writing, as opposed to building and moderating a comment system.
One thing I do want to add to my publishing process is an automatic post to fedi, then the addition of a link to that fedi post at the bottom of every new blog post. I'd be happy to have discussion occur in replies to that. Or on whatever link aggregator my post finds its way to.
But I need more time to write for my blog to be better, and running my own comment system would do the opposite.
![antonmedv avatar](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>){kind=small}
Nobody is entitled to spew their opinion from my site. They can post their own take on their own site. They can send an email, and I will amend a post or write a new one in response where necessary.
This is exactly why I removed comments from my blog 20 years ago. That, and the horrendous link spam problem.
I wonder why link spam still exists even though search engines no longer use the number of links to a page as a ranking factor — at least not in a way that would allow people to get their stuff to the first pages with link spam. What is it that makes link spam an activity worth the effort?
Even if link spam is less profitable, unsecured comment fields are also sometimes used for malware command and control. Nowadays you often see spam comments that are just full of strings of digits.
Yeah I don't really care what random people have to say about my blog posts. 🤷♂️
Do you care about comments on lobste.rs?
If someone shared one of my blog posts here? Not really. My account of my last trip, or a description of my D&D campaign, or a link to a tool I made are only public because I see no reason to hide them.
If people have thoughts on these that's fine, but they don't matter much to me.
Thanks different with me. I want to get comments, I value them. For me, it is intersting what people think about my posts/projects.
lobste.rs is invite-only; I don't know how a blog comment section could be invite-only
While I don't like comments too, I'm pretty certain that majority of my site visitors are unknowns (random people) and I'm interested in what they think, otherwise I would have shared it only with known ones (non-random people) but then it would have been not an internet blog, maybe an email message to them. That's being said, I encourage random people to email me their thoughts or comments when possible.
Yes this is the tragedy of the commons, yours is the right approach. I used to run my own blog with comments and so on... the occasional good comment (that could be an email) becomes absolutely outweighed by having to deal with idiots and spam.
Exactly!
This isn't about the entitlement of others, it's actually quite the opposite.
By not having comments on your website, you're outsourcing those comments to other platforms, denying yourself a community around your blog, or the opportunity to control the conversation (since you can just delete rude comments), and that's one reason for why your blog is dying, alongside the rest of the indie Internet, because people have moved on to the closed gardens that have comments (and that are now downranking posts with links). Static blogs with no comments has been a poison for blogging.
I have more thoughts on my own blog, ironically, this one with 0 comments:
Outsourced Voices, Outsourced Minds
I'm not asking to use any other platform. I'm not interesting in having a "community" around my blog specifically. The "community" I care about is called "world wide web".
That said, different people, different goals: If you care about capturing an audience and call it community, go wild. The prescriptive tone of the blog post ("should have"), however, felt like overreach.
By the way, I think it's weird to both want a community while also wanting to control the conversation: I might just be too anarchist to grant myself the ban hammer of conversation control over a community I supposedly plan to build.
The conflation of a captured audience with community is really common in these spaces, and it always makes me sad the way people view interaction with others. Real community is very different than having the same posters come in consistently and is something that is often built, and building it around yourself strikes me as something I really don't want. It feels like an extension of the "building a personal brand" and treating other people as engagement to farm style of interactions on the internet that I think is actually what got us to the world we have now, not the lack of comment section.
Kind of off topic, but I like your inclusion of a periodically rotating email address. It lets you avoid most of the spam (I hope!) while giving readers a proper
mailto:link if they want to send a private message.Oh, DEFINITELY not. My blog is my happy place and programmers can’t agree about anything.
Plus, communities form around aggregators. Lobsters is totally different from HN, Reddit, various Discords, etc. I like the focused discussions that come with each.
Your blog is your happy place, sure, but if your blog ends up on Lobsters, HN, Reddit, you're going to read and reply to the comments there, anyway, without any way to moderate them (other than complain to the service's moderators).
Also, in my experience, the visitors on my blog are aware that it is my blog, so I've gotten very few comments that are rude. It's like visiting someone else's house, and you don't make rude comments while you're in that house. And the very few rude comments I got, I deleted them without shame. By comparisson, Reddit or HN comments at least can be very rude, while also using a passive aggressive tone that's hardly banned by any of these websites. Which is why it's quite common to see complaints of authors with websites reaching the frontpage of HN (but they participate anyway).
I guess you've never been on the internet?
I don't want to be involved in content moderation whatsoever. I want to have a history of the things that I've written, with zero extra information. Whatever people want to say outside of that is none of my business.
I've been on the Internet since ~1999, and have had an actively maintained blog since 2008 — not very popular, but I'm pretty sure that it gets more traffic than a majority of Jekyll websites.
Nice! This post is suggesting what to do on my blog. I don't want to do what it's saying.
DEFINITELY yes. On my website. I do love comments! More comments, everywhere I cat get them!
I totally agree with the sentiment, but the economics is not in favor of that: you have to deal with moderation, potential security incidents and of course GDPR.
So the part I don't agree with is "it's not hard to host, it's uncomfortable to host". In my opinion it's more like "expensive to host". Expensive in the sense of quality attention. Someone could post illegal content in my comment section 24/7. They could to it when I'm on vacation, sleeping, in a meeting etc.
It's not even that we should not actually be responsible for such things. It's just that there is a lot more than just blog comment sections that I have to monitor frequently in 2026...
Do a pre-moderation! I do it.
People spend time polishing personal blog posts. Spend time building comments section!
And building comments system are fun! We software engineers love such things.
If you mean "pre-moderation" as "don't publish comments without approval", then I agree completely.
However, at that point, you might as well put an email address in your blog- it will have a similar effect.
(I moved my blog to a static website some time ago. I had very few valuable comments, so I didn't even bother preserving the comments. Instead, I put a footer on each post that reads "mail me at x". I occasionally receive some emails, and my feeling is that it's worked so much better than a comment box.)
I think many ills of the modern Internet are solved by not publishing comments without approval. I feel even Mastodon doesn't allow this well, and I suspect it would help so much...
that is actually a pretty decent solution, if you only get a small number of comments. Still, I'm not sure if it's possible to do it without GDPR.. Perhaps if the comments are fully anonymous?
What kind of information do you ask of people on your blog for it to fall under GDPR? o.O
takeout doesn't apply to "small" players as far as I remember
Note, the Isso commenting widget has optional emails, needed just for getting notifications.
DELETE FROM users WHERE email = ?and in all my years of blogging I have never gotten such a request.I think people think that GDPR or ePrivacy are more complicated than they actually are. If you don't do spyware shit, and just provide functionality that the visitor wants/expects, you basically don't have to do much, if anything. Consent and cookie banners show up all over the place because the vast majority of Internet companies deploy spyware at scale (e.g., Google Analytics, ads).
yup, email is the main problem, and even IP if your login system collects that (which I guess is wise to do).
Another problem is what to do about bots and whatnot trying to abuse the system. Once you add an external captcha provider for that, you will also need to add a cookie banner I guess. (Albeit it would be enough to do this for users who actually want to log in)
Maybe you could add a completely anonymous commenting system that does not log IP or email, and use some cookie-less captcha solution. But that might not be very fun to use.
It is often considered a legitimate interest to collect the IP adress for abuse prevention, if the storage duration (log rotation) is short, as it makes the impact less for the user, and thus makes it easier to meet the bar.
I don't really understand legitimate interest. It seems like every ad tech platform under the sun has a legitimate interest to track me? And I can object to it, but sometimes I have to object to each of their 5000 ad partners individually? How does that make sense? Would a blog need a button to let users object to the comment system's legitimate interest in storing the emails of commenters?
A lot of these companies are just ... wildly out of compliance with the law and get away with it anyway.
Ad tech is not a legitimate internet, and those companies are making illegal claims. The problem that EU countries have is that Data Protection Authorities are understaffed, overworked and move too slowly.
Logging IPs for security purposes is a recognized legitimate interest, so it's fine if your Nginx server has those logs, as long as you rotate them and don't keep them around for years.
Well yes. Some companies may stretch it too far and go beyond the letter and intent of the law. The proper way is to weigh the interests of users against the company's goal, and sometimes the conclusion will be negative.
The biggest bottleneck and weakness of the GDPR is the enforcement. In a perfect world, someone will report the practice to a supervisory authority, and they would swiftly issue penalties. But that is not the case, so a lot of companies get away with clearly illegal practices.
Edit: Some of the things a company should consider when determining legitimate interest are:
Edit 2: Another principle is that you can't switch your lawfullness basis (consent, legitimate interest, etc) if you first based it on consent and then the user withdraws the consent. So the banners with two buttons: consent and legitimate interest prechecked makes no sense. If I don't consent, then legitimate interest can't ever apply.
All these ad tech companies' interests in tracking me outweigh my interest in not being tracked, unless I click some object button, correct?
That is the interpretation the ad companies have been trying for a few years. A few have been slapped for it. The CJEU stated that’s not valid.
https://www.williamfry.com/knowledge/adtech-update-cjeu-landmark-data-protection-ruling-for-online-and-behavioural-advertising/
Some others moved away from it after seeing the case. However, the lack of enforcement has left others trying their luck.
As user, I would rather selectively share my data with an independent blog owner that with corporation like Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc.
So a blog with comments via Disqus or similar is not acceptable?
The request for deletion thing really worries me. What if a user can't "prove" that they are who they say they are? Do I have to understand my legal obligations with respect to account recovery now?
Personally I'm ready to debate in court that thisisalex@example.com is not in fact personal information because there can be a myriad of Alexes that can have that email address. Additionally I would assume that a blog that probably results in negative income qualifies as:
PII does not mean "personal information", it means "personally identifiable information".
And how does it personally identify someone if I have no other information of theirs ? From my perspective I think it's an argument worth making in court.
Also I find it amusing that random blog people are getting worried about this type of GDPR violations when probably they'll fall in the very long tail of offenders, if even.
As a personal blog I imagine it's way easier:
Upon reading more about it, it seems like I was wrong to point out a difference between personal information and personally identifiable information. The GDPR seems to use the term personal information.
This quote from article 4 is relevant:
An e-mail must surely count as an "online identifier".
The European Commission has an explainer (https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/data-protection-explained_en) which contains a list of examples of personal data:
I don't think you can argue that a personal e-mail address is anything but personal information under the GDPR. Especially if the e-mail contains the person's name and surname, which many e-mail addresses do.
I thought I was pretty explicit about which emails I consider to be non personal identifiable information, I don't understand why you keep arguing with me.
What I'm trying to say is that for small websites worrying about emails being PII is premature optimization of the worst kind. Do your thing, and worry about GDPR when you receive your first request for removal.
So we agree that at least some of the e-mail addresses your users sign up with are personal information. Good. Your first comment seemed to dispute that.
Then you need to handle that personal information in accordance with GDPR. It's not something you can care about only after you get a request for removal.
It did dispute that in the context of emails being used as an anti-spam mechanism. So on the assumption that someone is commenting shady stuff on a blog, I am 100% sure they will not use an email that can identify them personally.
Can you tell me why you think that?
For my personal websites, it most definitely is. First because no national org for enforcing of GDPR will go after a dude with a blog, second because when you have 100 comments a year on the blog, it's easy to remove/edit the idiots that used their personal email addresses and then had second thoughts to ask for their data to be removed.
I have been dealing with moderation, security and the GDPR for years, and the effort has been minimal. It probably depends on how big the audience for your blog is, but nowadays, a vast majority of static blogs with no comments have virtually no audience anyway.
This is a red herring.
I’ve been thinking that a basic moderation “pre-filter” might be something LLMs (even cheaper LLMs) could handle reasonably well. It would take off a huge chunk of the burden of human moderation.
No thanks. I used to do that, but only got angry people screaming at me. It adds nothing of value to me.
I do have webmentions (they also relay fedi comments), which makes commenting have just enough difficulty so that it keeps most angry people away.
i see your point. but we care for valuable comments! do filtering
I did filtering. But it was bunch of work for minimal gain.
If someone wants to comment something on my blog, they can send email or comment on fedi. Works well for me.
I generally feel it comment fields encourage low-quality interactions. If you want to tell me your reaction to one of my blog posts, send me an email instead. Makes it far less performative.
Generally if a blog post is sufficiently interesting, it gets picked up on places like HN or lobste.rs, where there is (usually) a moderated discussion with high quality participants. You rarely get that in a comment field.
This brother loves newlines even more than comments.
The author admitted it was written by an LLM in the comments. I'd link to that comment, but (and it's a pet peeve of mine) you can't link to individual comments.
It's here:
https://medv.io/blog/your-personal-blog-should-have-comments#:~:text=Awful%20writing%20style%20that%20reads%20like%20it%20was%20generated%20by%20a%20LLM
which should work with chrome-ish browsers.
Here's a pdf of it, since archive.org can't handle that kind of highlight link yet.
This post has to be engagement bait because most of your comments here explaining your position is just you saying you want more comments.
It is, he used to only spam links to his own projects and then started posting links to other content once it became incredibly obvious. ~antonmedv may be the most successful marketer on Lobste.rs ever.
Easiest way to get to the top of the "Active" page is by writing something kinda provocative and then replying to every. single. comment.
What can I say? I like comments! =)
One more for the: "been there, done that" camp.
I've thought about integrating fedi comments several times but so far I never followed through. I post about one thing per year here if I
really wantam actively looking for feedback (I don't mind it, ever).I had comments for five or six years and then realized a decade+ ago after looking over the comments I got that only one or two comments in all those years actually had anything worth saying.
If the content on your blog is valuable, people will discuss it anyway in various places where discussion happens. They will discuss it on Lobste.rs, HN, Reddit, Bluesky, Facebook, the fediverse. Everywhere where it’s convenient.
I’ve come to the conclusion that adding one more discussion outlet won’t concentrate the discussion in one place. Even when said outlet sits right next to the posts themselves and is ‘canonical’, that’s just not going to happen. On the contrary, it will just contribute to the dispersion of discussion.
Besides, having comments under an article means that the article stops being a document and starts being an application, and that’s something I’d like to avoid. So, no comments on my blog.
Comments under post are not for concentrating discussion.
But to have more comments!
Yes, and that's bad, being one reason the indie web is dying, IMO, replaced by social networks that are now deprioritizing links in their algorithm, an algorithm optimizing for rage, because that's what captures attention.
I'm shamelessly linking my own opinions here, as I care about the topic: https://alexn.org/blog/2025/10/13/outsourced-voices-outsourced-minds/
Eh. In an ideal world I agree, out of nostalgia for the early-2000s blogosphere if nothing else. But in recent history, when I’ve had comments turned on for a while, two things happen:
I use pre-moderation, but it’s honestly depressing to scroll through comments to approve and find that all of them are spam, you know?
The dynamics of online discussion seem to have moved on. I know of a few blogs left with active comment sections, but they are mostly frequently-updated, long-standing sites that have accumulated a dedicated readership over years.
Whereas my blog is an occasional hobby I post to less than half-a-dozen times most years. [shrug] So I’m not inclined to try and build a regular commenting community around it.
My personal blog should have whatever I want and nothing I don't. One of my sites is on ClassicPress now and still has comments enabled, but it's not updated often, and even when it was, I got very few comments. Even when I tried to start discussions and desperately wanted comments. Occasionally I got weird comments that I was hard-pressed to think of an appropriate reply for. Like... okay, you've written ... something that I guess a person could think? Uh, thanks?
My other main blog is a static site with no comments, and I have no plans to add them. I post when I feel like it, and if anybody has a reaction to what I say, they can poke me on my Fediverse profile, email me, or write their own blog. It's not my responsibility to host their opinion.
I sympathize with the author having nostalgia for a blogging culture that no longer exists, but not the framing of telling people what they should do. It would've been better if they'd simply talked about what they missed about blog comments and perhaps the dangers of "outsourcing" to social media. But many folks just don't want comments; be glad they shared their thoughts with you at all. The entire world is your canvas to react to the blog post; it's not their job to give you space to do so.
That was probably written by someone with no experience about what "blog comments" are.
I temporary removed comments on my blog in 2014:
https://ploum.net/la-fin-des-commentaires/index.html
I never added them back. That was the best thing I ever did to improve my writing, my clarity of thinking. There’s a reason why everyone removed them.
Your piece stated my thoughts much better than I could. But relative to this thread, I think they simply represent two different ideas of the purpose of having a blog. For me (and it sounds like for you) my blog is about writing. I use it as a way to practice my writing more often. Secondarily, I use the act of writing a blog post to help me remember things I want to remember.
This post says "With comments, it becomes a dialogue," but that's not the goal of every blog, and not every blog needs that. I'm happy having the dialog in a separate channel (even linked to the post, if it's a public channel) but I don't need to host and manage the dialog. And your section ("Parce que c’est un gouffre d’énergie") about the ways it becomes an energy pit lays that out quite nicely.
I could see why someone would consider the exchange in a comment section to be worth the energy. But I don't find it to be so, especially if the time and energy associated with maintaining it means I write less. It brings Neal Stephenson's essay to mind. Even though my writing is nothing like his, at all, and not nearly as well-crafted, the productivity equation he cites there applies to having a comment section on my blog.
@antonmedv if you haven't read ploum's piece because you don't read French, it's worth running it through a machine translator. The argument is quite a bit deeper than "because static page generators."
The reason: static page generators.
I'm seeing a lot of replies from you reiterating your unsupported stance without any regard to the clear reasons others are providing for not doing what you say everyone should do. I encourage you to instead reflect on the information provided by others and take time to consider. Unless you're offering to personally address these concerns (moderation, complexity, spam, etc.) for each and every blogger, you really have no right to tell people to add comments to their blogs while ignoring their reasons not to.
From my perspective all of this debate makes no sense (that people are arguing with OP and also that OP is arguing back).
OP's framing is wrong IMO. Their post is for the people who set up their blog on a SSG and never got around to adding a comments section (why is sort of irrelevant, but they offer some options). This is surely a sizable audience: I am among them and I've seen many other SSG blogs sans comments. OP is telling these people "please consider adding comments!"
Instead, in this thread, OP is getting a bunch of people who had set up comments showing up and saying "Don't tell me what to do, I chose to take my comments down or not add them in the first place!" Which is absolutely their prerogative. But they aren't OP's audience.
I'm not saying that these peoples' opinions don't matter (nor that they shouldn't share them), but engaging with OP in this debate is kind of pointless because clearly they disagree with OP over the reason for adding comments rather than the feasibility. And yes, GDPR exists but it's a weird "um actually" drum to beat when your blog surely is not so large to render it infeasible to remove comments if you must (be it by hand or script).
Lastly, throwing around a claim like "unsupported stance" to make OP's argument seem meritless is frankly unreasonable and hostile. Are you expecting OP to scrape all of the blogs they visited, count which are missing comments sections, and guess why? They noticed what they believe to be a trend and offered a reasonable explanation for why that trend exists. What more support does this observation require?
OP has certainly had questionable replies to comments here, but we don't need to gang up on them for this, since to me it's apparent that they don't bear any ill will. Everyone seems to be talking past each other.
[Allow me be rude here] I do not care. And I will be telling people to add comments. I really do they make blogs better!
I translated Ploum's post. I get it. All people are different. Yes, I understand what you do not want to have comments. But maybe you do! And I actually got comments (even a email (!)) from people what my post was a motivation for them to try own-hosted comments! So I guess mission accomplished =)
I removed comments in 2014. My blog ran on Wordpress until the end of 2022.
This is just an assumption on your part. While I’m sure there are folks who don’t have comments because they just want to use a static site generator, it’s not the universal truth you seem to think.
Over two decades I’ve experimented with a range of discussion formats on my personal blog from a full wiki, pingbacks, comments, nothing. I settled on nothing because it suit’s my site better. Moving to a static site generator was an informed decision. I know I’m not alone.
To me comments at Lobsters/HN bring much more value, for obvious reasons.
Yes! But this is comments outsourcing. I do value lobste.rs comments, I do value ALL the comments! More places to collect comments == good.
OP, Your Personal Blog Should Have RSS ;-) I was about to add yours to https://minifeed.net/ and did not find a feed.
Atom, not RSS. Atom is much easier to generate because it has well-defined escaping and content types, and fewer mutually incompatible flavours.
True! This is one of the things I still need to build. =))
I would rather shit in my hands and clap than put in the effort of creating and maintaining a comments system just so people can quickly and easily annoy me
Edit: also, parts of this sound like LLM output to me
The main reason I don't allow comments on my website is because I don't want to have to deal with the security implications of untrusted input. It's so much simpler for me as an administrator not to have to deal with possibly hostile users who could put CSS or or some hidden thing in my comment thing and then I'm fighting a war. I mostly make my site for myself. If other people want to read it, that's fine
Eh, I've done that, but the amount of spam that came my way is ridiculous. I got some nice comments from kind visitors, but most were spam. Casinos, porn, roofing and increasingly AI tooling advertisements. I have a CAPTCHA and I've added some filters, but life is too short to waste my time with this cat and mouse game.
I find great pleasure in maintaining an active comments section on my blog. My website isn't particulary high-traffic, so over the past 25 years it has accumulated only about 500 comments. Nevertheless I'm glad that people take the time to leave thoughtful comments.
I know many website owners cite spam as the main reason for disabling or avoiding comment sections altogether and I think that concern is completely valid. Spam is a real issue and I deal with it from time to time as well.
A simple trick that works for me is to never auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website is held in a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I delete all the spam and off-topic comments, and publish only the genuine on-topic ones on my website.
Same! I have even less comments on my website. But I do like comments. I want to encourage people to do comments.
Nice blog! But I would put comments directly under posts. I like to thinks of comments as of a value as the post itself.
People can email me. They can discuss my posts on bbs or station or the fediverse. But blog comments are just a vector for spam.
With comments comes moderation and fighting spam, I don't really wanna deal with that. Instead, I just have badges linking to external discussions, such as lobste.rs. Example: https://mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/
I think it would be fun to get Mastodon replies onto the page as a form of comment section. But I want to avoid a comment field on my website where anyone (or any bot) can spam links to their supplement pills or whatever.
I'll politely disagree. Blogging self-hosted since 1997. I started with Template::Toolkit and after experiments with different systems that supported comments, returned to static site generation and stopped accepting comments in any form circa 2009. The interactions were spam, spammy pingbacks, exploit attempts, or nearly content-free. I'm not building a personal brand around it, searching for an audience, and chasing engagement so it's not worth my time to deal with that mess. I write, maybe someone reads it, maybe no one does, it's good.
Just because I write something and make it available for people to read, doesn't mean I should be on the hook to enable someone else's discourse around it. That's pure entitlement.
Isn't putting it out there for others enough? You're not entitled to a "free" avenue to critique, dispute, or even agree for that matter with the subject matter or the way it's presented at the cost of my own time, and potentially money. If I write something i've put it out there, if you then take the time to read it, that's not me forcing you to do that in return for anything in some unspoken bargain or deal. There are plenty of places (lobste.rs, reddit, the orange place, etc...) where people can discuss and have a larger breadth of discussion than would ever occur in a comments section embedded in my site, and I don't want to have the opportunity to control and filter that discussion.
I would much rather spend more time writing and learning to write better, and researching things to write, than moderating and controlling the discourse around what i've written.
I don't even write that much but this got me triggered.
I just link my email address so people can privately write to me and start an actual conversation.
Comments on individual blog sites are bloat and low value considering the burden.
I used to have comments (first self-hosted, then Disqus before it become too enshittified). It wasn't worth the hassle.
Now I basically echo everything to fedi. If you have something to say, just reply to the post there, or email me.
Comments require moderation. Ain't nobody got time to moderate a personal blog
Also I can add that I was a very regular blog commenter during the high times of blogging and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times an interesting conversation happened in the comments of a blog.
The most reasonable way to approach most media, social or otherwise, is to treat it as write-only.
I typically don’t want to add fields that users can add content to with a personal site if I can avoid it. That means I now need some sort of moderation and I just don’t want to deal with it. More power to those that like it though.
While reading, I wanted to say „but…“ several times, however it is nice writing overall and I also support the internet as P2P network of independent servers run by individuals and small groups rather than few big corporations and their global clouds. It is not only about distribution of technology but also distribution of power, sovereignty and resilience.
Thanks! =)
My blog is a place of curiosity, learning and fun. As soon as I add comments, I'm concerned about arguments and criticism, or why no one is interested enough to comment.
My posts on lobste.rs and the orange site don't draw much interest, so it looks like minimal gain for extra work.
Well, you can just try! Building comments system also interesting.
I prefer to have Webmentions that alert me to being referenced on someone else's blog (or whatnot - shouldn't Mastodon support Webmentions?). Then I can have a look, and maybe update my post with a new section about the mention if I feel it's warranted.
My blog should be things I've written, and only that. IMHO.
Eh, I'll pass. My blog is currently hosted on Codeberg for a whopping 4 euros a year (which is not actually spent on hosting itself, rather just to rent the domain). It has zero moving parts, no databases, tasks, no nothing. I generate a couple HTML files using DThompson's excellent Haunt and I'm done.
Assuming I don't want a SaaS solution, the moment I'd need to add any interactivity, I'd need to switch to a VPS, change my static site to one with a runtime. It's just too much effort.
Not to mention, by publishing your content on various aggregators, you not only get comments by current readers, but also draw in a new audience with each post. POSSE is cheap, simple, and reliable.
I have a static site, and comments, and the ability to link here. I think it's the best of both worlds. I do want to see what people have to say about my writing, but I also want control over it.
There's a word for what's happening here: threadsitting.
There's a less nice word also, that adds one letter to that word.
Lots of negative feedbacks! I agree with the author: it keeps you honest. On an article about DNS, I've got a positive comment from Paul Vixie. This was nice and could be considered as a signal the article is credible.
This is The Internet. =)
Exactly! The whole point: is to find like-minded, in this chaos on negativity and aggression! Getting positive comments outweighs all the rude comments.
It doesn't work well if the personal blog have much traffic. I think Hacker News or Lobste.rs solve this problem almost perfectly, we cannot talk with author directly, but we can talk with someone who is interested in this blog as well.
I don't think so; too much hustle + I would rather have discussions through mail and platforms like Reedit, LinkedIn and Lobsters. It's a nice separation of concerns, plus, if somebody makes a comment significantly extending, elaborating or correcting statements made in my work - I attach it to the original post/article :)
What is more, in the technical, intellectual discourse of the highest quality - friction is a feature, not a bug.
To add to that, maybe instead of saying people should carry the burden of maintaining comments sections on their own blogs we should instead say everyone should have their own blog. If you want to publicly comment on a blog post of mine, write your own blog post in response!
I believe John Gruber used to say that, quite literally. I can't find the link to where he did, though.
I agree in principle but it's just such a pain. I'll post my blog links to mastodon/bluesky and you can find me there if you want to scream at me.
Nice blog you have! I like it!
Comments section add a nice vibe too! =) Try it again.
If you can show me how to add comments to Hugo in a way where I don't have to do anything annoying or difficult, I will.
I can show you how to do comments in php =))
I have a comments section using giscus and readers hardly ever comment. So I'm not surprised that most people don't bother.
https://simonhartcher.com/posts/2026-01-16-my-projects-in-2025/
Well, this is why I do not like "Signin with GitHub". I don't want to!
But maybe I want to comment, but not at the price of "signin".
I see the appeal, but I already have a pile of partially finished blog posts, and only so much time to spend on my blog. I'd much rather spend that time writing, as opposed to building and moderating a comment system.
One thing I do want to add to my publishing process is an automatic post to fedi, then the addition of a link to that fedi post at the bottom of every new blog post. I'd be happy to have discussion occur in replies to that. Or on whatever link aggregator my post finds its way to.
But I need more time to write for my blog to be better, and running my own comment system would do the opposite.
I just use https://utteranc.es/
But... I don't post often so it's neither here nor there
lol :-)
(issues are part of the data set in a gh project that isn't as easily exfiltrable as the git repo itself)