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# Comments are hard
- URL: https://werd.io/comments-are-hard/
- Published: 2022-08-02T20:38:43.000Z
- Updated: 2022-08-02T20:38:43.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: #Import 2025-06-13 09:23

Building a comments system is really hard. I tried to build one for [Known](https://withknown.com), which powers my website, but found that spammers circumvented it surprisingly easily. You can flag spam using [Akismet](https://akismet.com/) (which was built for WordPress but works across platforms), but this process tends to require you to pre-screen comments and make them public after the fact. That’s a fair amount of work and a fair amount of unnecessary friction for building community.

If you have a blog - you *do* have a blog, don’t you? - you can post a response to one of my posts and send a [webmention](https://indieweb.org/Webmention). But not everybody has their own website, and the barrier to entry for sending webmentions [is pretty high](https://jamesmead.org/blog/2020-10-13-sending-webmentions-from-a-static-website).

So I’ve been looking for something else.

[Fred Wilson gave up on comments and asks people to discuss on Twitter](https://avc.com/). That works pretty well, but I’m not really into forcing people to use a particular service. That’s also why I’m not particularly into using [Disqus](https://disqus.com/) embeds, which also [unnecessarily track you across sites](https://fatfrogmedia.com/delete-disqus-comments-wordpress/). Finally, I was using [Cactus Comments](https://cactus.chat/), which is based on the decentralized [Matrix network](https://matrix.org/) for a while, but it occasionally seemed to break in ways that were disconcerting for site visitors. (It’s still a very cool project.)

I love comments, and I guess that means I’m writing my own system again. To do so means getting into an arms race with spammers, which I’m not very excited about, but I don’t see an alternative that I’m completely happy about.

Do you run a blog with comments? How do you deal with these issues? I’d love to learn from you.