Self-hosting a blog is lonely : readers don't create an account to comment on every self-hosted blog. This is my journey in pursuit of welcoming comments from the Fediverse, going through Lemmy, then leading me to Ghost with a custom implementation.
So, to address the elephant in the room… Why does commenting on a blog post need any kind of account? Why not have fields for “name” and “comment body” and use capcha and/or manual approval to guard against spam?
Like, why does everything need to be tied to an account nowadays?
A) Solving Captchas isn’t protecting from abuse/spam anymore. People in countries with cheap labour costs are being paid (or forced) to solve these for spam networks. And nowadays, LLMs can solve them almost better than any human. Manual approval is completely infeasible once you have a somewhat larger following.
Tying comments to some form of account is at least somewhat of a hurdle for spammers.
and
B) Some people want to keep ownership of their data. As long as the comment is tied to my account, I can easily find, edit or even delete it. Try that with some comment you made on some obscure blog 5 years ago; which address you don’t remember and with an email address you no longer have.
So, to address the elephant in the room… Why does commenting on a blog post need any kind of account? Why not have fields for “name” and “comment body” and use capcha and/or manual approval to guard against spam?
Like, why does everything need to be tied to an account nowadays?
Because
A) Solving Captchas isn’t protecting from abuse/spam anymore. People in countries with cheap labour costs are being paid (or forced) to solve these for spam networks. And nowadays, LLMs can solve them almost better than any human. Manual approval is completely infeasible once you have a somewhat larger following.
Tying comments to some form of account is at least somewhat of a hurdle for spammers.
and
B) Some people want to keep ownership of their data. As long as the comment is tied to my account, I can easily find, edit or even delete it. Try that with some comment you made on some obscure blog 5 years ago; which address you don’t remember and with an email address you no longer have.
Having an account won’t solve the problem with A, since spam accounts are a problem even in the fediverse
Of course, ownership, I somehow forgot about that, too much looking from the blogger side lol
But yes, 100%.
Reply notifications, commenting history.
I don’t know about you, but I hate those, and wouldn’t want people to have to go through that, as I wouldn’t want to have to go through that.
That’s a lot more work, and it delays the conversation when replying to another visitor.
My guess would be trolls and/or bullying