Veritable Quandaries of Comments

The conscientious website owner, not being disillusioned by the false promise of fame and fortune, will wisely consider if supporting a commenting system is worth the overhead effort, whatever the measure of worth is. Is the site owner trying to create a community? Are they looking for fandom and praise? Do they have nothing better to do? If the site owner does have the time and attention to make a social hangout of their digital notebook, then the matter quickly becomes one of ethics, and they should have a good look in the mirror before taking another step.

In these turbulent times, the conscientious site owner knows that enabling comments often flies in the face of low-impact design and data privacy. These are relatively simple concepts that site owners should understand or have their diplomas revoked. A low-impact website is one that loads near instantaneously through even the sketchiest of bandwidths. There are many steps and checks to make in reaching that nimble state and satisfy every audience, most of which are beyond scope here.

Data privacy is different from low-impact design, but one of the steps alluded to above in the aim of making a website light and fast is to cut out needless third-party markup and spyware, and that important topic deserves a brief detour for therapeutic venting.

Google is notorious for making free-to-use software gussied up as productivity-ware, but it is largely bait-n-hook spyware for Google’s benefit, and we are the fish. Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Amp, Google Ads, Google this, Google that … Is anyone else sick of having to see, say, and write the name Google? I wish ‘Google’, and other silly big-tech brand names that give the impression of a Playskool game for toddlers, would vanish from view and thought like they never existed.

Google is not the only provider of digital snake oil, of course. Every big tech company is anxious to have website owners load up their sites with various kinds of tracking software posed as tools of benefaction. Some spyware inject third-party content into our websites, such as advertisements and social media widgets, polluting the web space like obnoxious roadside billboards. Most website owners even want this. It is strange.

Other spyware is less visible until you read a ways into an article or scroll directly to the bottom of the page for signs of a legal disclaimer. The Amazon affiliation program, for example, is a particularly devilish scheme. It has encouraged legions of otherwise decent people to create energy-burning websites that do nothing but shoehorn readers into the coffers of Bezobub. When you pick up the stink of an Amazon-affiliated website—the C-grade marketing writing is the first clue your in one—hit the Back button as fast as you can before the devil sucks you down.

And still other spyware leaves no sign on the surface. Some of the Google tricks already mentioned are only revealed once you look at a web page’s source markup. Facebook’s open graph cancer is another example of such under-the-surface tracking technology that nobody but Facebook benefits from, comparatively. How Facebook managed to con so many site owners into using open graph, I do not know, but now is a good time to clear that ridiculous company’s toxicity out of your website’s markup.

Such third-party content and code not only spies on site owners and visitors with equal indifference, it also weighs or slows websites down. That is good for nobody and nothing, including the environment, which is already falling apart from society’s greedy tendencies to consume and bloat.

And it’s a lot worse still.

No wonder a growing number of more-discerning readers are choosing to visit Gemini websites instead of those over regular HTTP; they want to escape the insanity of surveillance capitalism and the web’s overwhelming glut of content marketing.

Fortunately for conscientious site owners on the HTTP, third-party poison is easily dodged or rid of. We need to treat visitors with more respect, not like cows to be milked.

Not all matters of privacy are so cut and dried, though, and comments are a good example. They may fall into the rancid lot of spyware or not, depending on how responsible a website owner is.

Commenting systems like Disqus, for instance, are some of the worst kinds of third-party code and content. Disqus alone collects, at the time of this writing, six categories of data (see section 2b) about users of its software. The first category alone includes a user’s first name, last name, username or similar identifier, date of birth, email address, telephone number, and mailing address. And that is not only from form fields that gullible users willingly fill in; Disqus can scrape that information directly from posts in comment threads, which it may, and will, use, store and transfer.

Where does that personal data transfer to? Advertising agencies, for a price, who in turn barter it with similar agencies until your personal data is stored in countless databases around the globe. And there your data waits to be plucked by capitalists eager to shove needless products and services down your throat and up your ass, or to be pilfered by thieves who could steal your identity and ruin your life. Hence, site owners using Disqus, or any other third-party commenting system, do not care about the well-being of site visitors. They should not be website owners and you should not visit their websites.

Incidentally, using any centralized social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, … even LinkedIn) is equivalent to using Disqus in terms of how your personal data is scraped and sold to advertisers. Wealthy companies get wealthier from your personal information and you do not see a penny of it. It is called surveillance capitalism. If that fact does not sit well with you, then do not remain a complicit stooge in the exploitative plans of big tech. Delete any and all of those accounts you have and liberate yourself. It will make you feel good. I speak from the experience of having done it. Life goes on and is actually better. Go back to owning and loving your own website if you need a web presence at all.

Spyware aside, there are three decent ways of supporting comments, if that is the site owner’s desire.

Native commenting systems: Many content publishing systems have native comments functionality, or it can be add easily by way of a plugin, module, or what have you. These turn-on/strap-on commenting features are not all created equal, however. If such a system still requires a would-be commenter to give up their email address, then the site owner is, perhaps blissful ignorant of the fact, ignoring the principles of data privacy. The commenter could use a fake email address in that case, and they should if the need to comment is vitally important (doubtful), but that is beside the point.

A commenting system should not be designed to collect personal information from the start, and that includes email addresses, a type of digital personal data defined by the GDPR. If a native commenting system does initially require giving up an email address, readers should avoid the temptation of commenting, in my humble opinion. If a conscientious website owner cannot develop a single Message box with a Submit button, they should forego implementing any commenting system and be happier for it.

Mailed in comments: Another approach to comments is more hands-on. In this case comments are accepted by email; the only way email addresses should be received from web users when not for administrative or commercial reasons. This approach ideally results in comments that have been stripped of formatting, links, images, and personal information. It is a curated approach for quality feedback on low-traffic websites, easily accounted for under a GDPR policy for email processing, and results in the lightest comments footprint possible without eliminating comments entirely. A nice example of this approach is used by the solar-powered version (occasionally offline) of Low-Tech Magazine.

The New York Times also uses a mail-in method for comments. As a media publisher who receives a tsunami of comments per day, mail-in commenting helps NYT moderators control the flood and hostility. The process likely discourages the bulk of off-the-cuff commenters whose ‘contributions’ are dubious anyway. On the moderation end, mailed comments are easily filtered and blocked if they do not abide by the publisher’s rules. Either way, comments are more effectively quality-controlled by the mail-in method than what any form-oriented commenting system can do. As another strategic benefit for the NYT, select comments are used as information design elements in editorial, though I am unaware of how that looks. That is an impetus for would-be commenters to craft smart and reasoned contributions, because anything less will not be used as highlights in the NYT’s editorial.

The mail-in approach to comments is how I would handle them if I were to accept comments for publication here, and the contact form is ideal for that purpose. I like the attentive, hands-on nature of this method, which makes comments a collaborative content development effort between owner and reader. But the added time and attention is also why I do not publish comments. There is also the fact commenters cannot autonomously delete their comments later, should they want to, but I would nevertheless accommodate all deletion requests as part of my GDPR plan.

Decentralized comments: A third and last approach to ethical comments support, as far as I am aware, is a bit more adventurous, and admittedly not for every website owner. It requires adopting decentralized technology and interacting with readers in the fediverse. In this way, comments are not comments so much as they are a merging of two federating software systems. A person might have a federating blog set up with Writefreely, for example, or on Write.as, and append microposts from readers made via Mastodon, an another example of federating software. Such an arrangement requires no demand for an email address to comment, aside from having an account on some instance in the fediverse, and that offers other benefits besides commenting on articles.

The fediverse, people, get into it. It is a place where everyone is their own space jockey in control of their own content, and capitalists and propagandists are rendered insignificant.

That is my preaching on comments, but I practice it in the ultimate way. I do not provide comments as a site owner and I no longer comment on any website where it is impossible to delete the comments I make. I strongly recommend you adopt a similar stance. Frankly, it is better to not spread yourself around on the web, leaving traces of yourself everywhere. Stick to open forums and federated instances that are designed for community interaction around subjects important to you, and leave it at that. But make sure you can delete those comments and posts, if you want to, else the forum is not privacy-respecting by law.

And never let anyone tell you that it is wrong to delete comments, forum posts, or anything else you put online, because of ‘historical value’, record, or whatever. Discrete web documents and entire websites disappear from the web all the time. Some people might think it is sad and unfortunate, as it is when loved ones are lost, but that is simply the ecology of the web, the digital ecosystem, shifting and changing in time.

In fact, if I were to offer commenting here, my site would be a good one to post comments to because I have arranged with the Internet Archive to not have any websites on this domain archived. I routinely check to make sure they are living up to that agreement. I like and use the Internet Archive for old books released to the public, the digital library checkout, and what have you, but I do not believe in the Archive’s default habit of quietly archiving personal websites. Nor do I believe that anyone but the website owners themselves should make archival requests, if that is what they want to do. That is not the Archive’s current modus operandi, though; it makes the site owner opt out instead of in, and unless they do opt out, any fool on the internet can demand to have the site archived. I do not like that. Sure, my site is public readable, but that does not mean I want it copied to and available from other locations, which is bordering on copyright infringement, even though that’s a ridiculous notion on the web. But I do not make up the laws, I simply use them to my fair interest. Most site owners may not care, or even know what is going on, but some of us do.

Conscientious site owners—a scant number as you might now understand—should avoid collecting a user’s personal data without a legally-justified reason for it, even if users treat their own privacy recklessly. And if the site owner is equally interested in making their website light and fast, that is another reason to leave out frivolous code, markup, and content. Comments, in my opinion, are frivolous code, markup, and content that require more human effort and electrical energy to sustain than they are worth. Leave ‘em out, and do not use centralized social media as a substitute.