New Comment System

Today I replaced this blog's comment system with Utterances, a new comment system built on GitHub issues.

Previously this website used Disqus. I got rid of it because I learned that it had privacy issues as well as a bunch of other problems that aren't worth elaborating on. I know it's a popular comment system in spite of its problems. Disqus has a bunch of user engagement features that I never even bothered to learn about, so I'm not going to miss it.

Utterances is a simple and lightweight comment system with no ads or tracking or other nonsense. The comment thread associated with any page is linked to an issue in a specific GitHub repo. You will need a GitHub account to leave a comment, which is fine, because most of the people I expect to engage with are already on GitHub. This is a better fit for me and for this website.

To see how it works, look at the comment(s) on bottom of this page and compare with this GitHub issue. I created a separate repo just for this website's comments because the repo for the actual website is not public. There's an utterances bot that manages the link between the comments on this page and the issues in that repo. That's all there is to it! Easy to setup and easy to maintain.