There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.

Which are and which work with a static Hakyll site?

Maybe https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

That seems to require you to host your own server and doesn't look much better in terms of complexity.

See my comment nearby about EffectiveDiscussions — it's a new commenting system, open source, & there's hosting. (https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments if you didn't find my other comment)

(What did you mean with "look ... in terms of complexity"? You mean how-complicated-it-is-to-install?)

I don't like Disqus mostly because the UX is clunky. Are there other things people dislike about it?

Being tracked by a single third party on every site that uses it comes to mind.

Disqus shows ads, unless you pay like $10/month. (& tracks your visitors, like someone else mentioned.)

Maybe you would instead like the looks of EffectiveDiscussions — it's a new commenting system I'm developing. See my other comment nearby (or, if you didn't find it, go to: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments ).

This is UX-ish, but I regularly have login/posting issues and very slow loading times off Disqus.

Commenting system for static site please? Meaning I don't have to host anything dynamic myself and the price won't kill you.

EffectiveDiscussions is a new alternative this year 2017. It's open source, or hosting for $2/month. (I'm developing it.)

Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (That's a static website built with Gatsby.)

Read more about it: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments (landing page, not finished)

Since it's new, it's a bit risky: maybe some bugs. & has some novel features, inspired by HackerNews actually: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can... (but that's not totally ported to embedded-comments yet). Currently implementing single-sign-on.

I scanned the article to see if it was interesting enough to dive into the details, but when I saw the Disqus plugin I closed the tab. What's the point of dropping Adsense if you keep the Disqus plugin?

Simple, they value the discussion capabilities provided by Disqus. Disqus was worth keeping, Adsense was not.

That’s my point exactly. Did they do the same exercise for Disqus? Or did they get all scientific on evaluating Adsense, and go with a “hunch” for Disqus?

That’s like saying “Marlboro cigarettes are harmful, here’s proof, let’s grab a pack of Lucky Strikes and discuss”.

It's more like smoking two brands of cigarettes and then deciding to stop half your smoking; that is surely an improvement...

This is just whataboutism. AdSense should be judged on its own merits, and it fails badly: it does nothing I want (aside from delivering quite small amounts of money) at an unacceptable cost. Maybe Disqus is also bad but I would have to ponder how much I want commenting and how to deal with the extant corpus of comments and in any case, at the moment I am gearing up for another ad test to try to figure out what about AdSense is so harmful (and help convince the doubters that there is an effect at all), so I can't test Disqus without complicating things a lot.

Can you also add a way to add TLDRs to everything, pls? :D