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title: "There goes using Disqus comments"
date: {m: 7, d: 5, y: 2017}
categories:
- 'text'
- 'dev'
---
# There goes using Disqus comments
I've removed Disqus comments.
The main initiative for this decision is that they're now going to be adding
advertisements to some sites.
There are a few reasons why it's tempting to *keep* using Disqus, actually:
* These new advertisements only affect large, commercial sites. They explicitly
aren't going to be adding any ads to personal blogs, in fact.
* The advertisements aren't even going to be the usual, intrusive, clickbait
things you'll find on any other site - instead they'll be ads promoting new
Disqus features.
But I'm still getting rid of Disqus comments.
First off, the fact that they can and *will* change things like this is
appalling. Disqus has always been that awesome, free, ad-less discussion tool
anybody can use just by embedding it on their website, hardly any setup needed.
They aren't going back on much of that *per se*, but.. it's just kind of like
they're going from being that one not-for-profit tool to being for-profit, all
of a sudden, you know?
This whole thing feels like if Twitter decided to embed ads inside your
profile, assuming your Twitter account has over (for example) 75,000 followers,
with an option that those people with 75K+ followers pay a subscription to get
rid of them.
Or maybe it's more like if Streamable decided to stick advertisements on the
sides of your videos once they get 10,000 views.
Because, you know, we trust them? We trust those sites not to mess with how we
use them or how people see the things we make through them. But clearly that
isn't actually reliable.. and that's kind of frustrating, and not something I
want to get stuck in.
Honestly, this is all more worrying for *bigger* sites. There was only a couple
of discussions done through Disqus on this blog; other sites have *so many*
more. I don't know how they'll deal with it.. it looks like they'll either have
to abandon and obliterate old comments, or be forced into either paying for
Disqus or ending up have ads.
(Or some sort of compromise. Other options include backing up all Disqus
threads, but I'm not sure that's possible without writing a Crazy Hack. Another
option would be only displaying Disqus threads on old posts, but that's not
really wonderful, either.)
## How can we comment now??
So.. there's no incredible option yet. What *are* fine options for the time
include:
* Write me an email. I'm not going to embed it here, but suffice it to say that
it doesn't take much effort to guess; also, it's an at-gmail.com. Seriously.
Virtually no effort to find.
* Send me a tweet. My account's [@towerofnix][twitter] there (surprised?);
those are (slightly) more public than emails, which is probably good, but
also limited to 140 characters (or - ugh - chunks of 140 characters).
* Write me a Scratch comment. My username is [_nix][scratch] (with an
underscore before "nix"). I guess this is handy if you're one of the few
people in the world who has a Scratch account, but then, chances are most of
the people who view my blog are them.
All of those are imperfect for various reasons. And sorry for removing Disqus
comments. I know it got rid of a good discussion on radios. (Just kidding, [I
saved that!][radios] No reason not to.) It'll probably make commenting less
easy in the future, until I find some better solution than I listed above.
(No, you don't get to pressure me to do that *now*, thank you!)
As a side effect of removing Disqus comments, this site is now 100%
JavaScript-free. Bwahahahaha. Run this on all your stupid browsers! (Er, just
don't look at [the last post][fractions] through curl or view source; I haven't
figured out how to embed SVGs well yet!)
[fractions]: posts/17-fractions-and-simplification-explained.html
[twitter]: https://twitter.com/towerofnix
[scratch]: https://scratch.mit.edu/users/_nix/
[radios]: static/media/18-radio-discussion.png
|
