WordPress and Disqus in 2019

WordPress is a vital resource that hasn’t taken undue advantage of its users like other free, hosted services have done. But right now, it’s not for me.

The one thing I miss about blogging with a static-site generator is the lack of native comments. It’s the one thing self-hosted WordPress (aka WordPress.org) gets right.

It’s probably because WP was “doing” comments before Twitter and Facebook came along. Back then, social was comments.

Now nobody seems willing to really tackle blog comments, especially in the context of self-hosting. There are a few bolt-on projects, but no blog software itself, and no static-site generator that I know of is going beyond easy integration of Disqus.

I was never crazy about the off-site comments model that Disqus uses, and I’m not going to deploy it here, even though Hugo makes it ridiculously easy to do so.

I’m REALLY not crazy about the kinds of ads that Disqus runs. They’re like the horrible clickbait ads that most websites put at the bottom to make a few extra bucks. Even “serious” sites do it. I wish they wouldn’t.

I know I could pay Disqus $5 a month to make these cheesy ads go away, but since I’m not crazy about the off-site/embed model, I’d rather do without.

I’m thinking about creating links to posts on Reddit and holding discussion over there. I know that is also “off-site,” but it seems better to me – here and now – to have a link to a Reddit thread that isn’t going anywhere rather than an embed that disappears when you change the URL, or even go from http to https. I know a lot of people aren’t crazy about Reddit, and that is making me pause for the time being.

I’ve seen bloggers use Hacker News for their comments, but to me Reddit seems more suited to what I’m doing.