Getting Rid of Comments on my Site

Ever since 2012 I’ve had supported comments on this site using Disqus. Usually, the things I post don’t warrant a lot of discussion, but a few posts have garnered quite a few comments. My most popular post, Using scikit-learn Pipelines and FeatureUnions has 88 as of the time time I am writing this.

Like many other people, I’ve since come to recognize that the commentable web usually does not spur deep or meaningful dialog. The extra maintenance overhead, page load time, sharing my visitor data with a third party, and clutter on my site just isn’t worth the convenience of supporting low-effort commentary. I’d rather not fragment conversations into a proprietary database that neither I nor my visitors control. With that in mind, I’ve decided to remove Disqus from my site. You can still visit the comment archive here, but I will not be moderating comments or exerting any effort to ensure this archive continues to exist.

I’d rather commentary take place on sites like Hacker News where moderation and maintenance have stronger guarantees. And of course, you’re always welcome to send me an email.