1. I host a static blog. this is not just for simplicity and cheaper hosting but also for security - running your own wordpress/php thing makes you into a huge target to get hacked with whatever zero-day was discovered in WP in the last four hours. some of us don't have time to upgrade/babysit wordpress twice a week. Running a standalone comment system would again open my system up to a whole world of potential vulnerabilities I'd rather not have to babysit.
2. a comment system in particular is like mecca for spammers, who are constantly, relentlessly trying to take advantage of such systems. Even if there were an open source comment system I could run myself, you still need to integrate with some larger-world "spam database" type of thing, to identify trends - with wordpress I used to use Askimet. So you need a 3rd party service anyway, why not just put the whole comment thing into it and have them handle the whole thing.
basically with disqus I can plug it into any old blog, not look at it for 6 months, and when i come back, it's still running, hasn't allowed my server to get hacked and isn't loaded with spam.
Don't get me wrong, i can understand your reasons, but if you think your blog content is worth a commenting system, someone might find it upsetting that you are sending him to some external, tracking, data leeching entity where he even may need to create a new account, give away his email address just for your laziness to maintain a blog software (which _really_ is not that hard).
You will hopefully understand then that i don't like the idea of sending some service data (the information that i am browsing your blog is not something some other party needs to know, let alone my comment and potentially other data). Even worse, a non-tech-savy person may not even recognize that he is surfing two different websites in one and where he is sending data to. Then again, you probably don't care about my comment. But so much for my feelings about disqus and what i think about it.
> someone might find it upsetting that you are sending him to some external, tracking, data leeching entity where he even may need to create a new account, give away his email address
I'm not at all happy about those things, but this is an issue of tradeoffs - the blog I'm talking about isn't my key business, it's merely a side thing for occasional announcements. My key software project is SQLAlchemy, I run my own Trac instance, and I regularly have to babysit it for when it is getting spammed or crawled or slowing down my server or whatever - but I want to own that data and not give it for free to github, so I make the effort. Similarly, I run my own Jenkins servers instead of relying on Travis and I host them on my own EC2 instances. Services and data which are important to me I self-host. Blog comments for me are not.
If I were running a political blog where I'd like to invite lively discussion from a wide variety of individuals, then I'd probably want to take the effort to self-host. But as we all know, if my political blog is visited by folks the US government wants to know about, I will be coerced into secretly sending all my data to the NSA in any case.
> just for your laziness to maintain a blog software (which _really_ is not that hard).
Of course it's not that hard - but when you say something is "really not that hard", you have to consider that as an OSS developer, I am babysitting literally dozens of technical streams, including services and hosting for my projects and technical issues for all kinds of people every single day, all of which is effort I put out for free, save for whatever I get on gittip. Every new service or software I have to host and babysit adds to what is already a formidable amount of plates to keep spinning - so those things that I do self-host have to be worth it. I write only a handful of blog posts a year which are themselves of little consequence and entirely technical. Nobody needs to comment on them and the people who do are certainly technical.
The existing solution, WordPress, is far too difficult to maintain, and it is some of the worst written software in history - I wrote about the many issues I had with it here: http://techspot.zzzeek.org/2010/11/21/how-coders-blog/ .
I'm in no way implying that a self-hosted comment server isn't a fantastic idea and something sorely needed - if a non-commercial, privacy-oriented organization wanted to host and maintain it for free use by others, I'd switch from Disqus immediately.
And that is just a "apt-get install xyz" away. That's no big effort.
All in all, what you are telling me is that your own blog post is important enough for you to not just use wordpress.com, blogger, tumblr or whatever is out there but that your visitors privacy is non-important to you. But you're a tech-savy developer, you're on "hacker news", you should care for at least some basic amount of privacy! ;)
1. I host a static blog. this is not just for simplicity and cheaper hosting but also for security - running your own wordpress/php thing makes you into a huge target to get hacked with whatever zero-day was discovered in WP in the last four hours. some of us don't have time to upgrade/babysit wordpress twice a week. Running a standalone comment system would again open my system up to a whole world of potential vulnerabilities I'd rather not have to babysit.
2. a comment system in particular is like mecca for spammers, who are constantly, relentlessly trying to take advantage of such systems. Even if there were an open source comment system I could run myself, you still need to integrate with some larger-world "spam database" type of thing, to identify trends - with wordpress I used to use Askimet. So you need a 3rd party service anyway, why not just put the whole comment thing into it and have them handle the whole thing.
basically with disqus I can plug it into any old blog, not look at it for 6 months, and when i come back, it's still running, hasn't allowed my server to get hacked and isn't loaded with spam.