Currently this web site has around 4300 posts and over 20,000 comments.  It’s still a small blog, but it pays to have some help in managing comments.  Disqus has been fairly good at that, allowing for threading, response flagging via email, and upvotes.  I’ve also had a fairly easy time with spamming comments and banning users.  I’ve had to ban mostly David Brock type CTR shills and trolls, as well as some Bloomberg trolls who tried to hide their identity.

That’s all about to change.  Disqus has gone full SJW.

Recently, many passionate users have reached out to us regarding instances of hate speech across our network. Language that offends, threatens, or insults groups solely based on race, color, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or other traits is against our network terms and has no place on the Disqus network. Hate speech is the antithesis of community and an impediment to the type of intellectual discussion that we strive to facilitate.

[ … ]

Currently, we are working on improved tools to help publishers effectively prevent troublesome users from returning to their sites. And as we get smarter about identifying hate speech, we are working on ways to automatically remove it from our network.

And that means exactly what you think it means.  Breitbart is taking a beating in the comments from the other snowflakes in the comments, and there is a fairly robust beatdown from Disqus users back at Disqus as well.

I simply won’t allow another party to moderate comments on my web site, especially a company who apparently joined the ranks of social justice warrior.  Progressives are heavy into the tech sector, from Google to Facebook, to reddit and Disqus.  Very well.  I don’t have to use their product.  Disqus will now find out just how good and necessary they are when they start deleting comments based on anonymous feedback and arbitrary rules.  I suspect this won’t be pretty for them.  Either way, it’s their problem now.

My programmer – who is my oldest son Joshua – hasn’t been able to spend much time on the site recently because he has a full time job as a professional programmer.  This is the impetus we needed to work on that bucket list for the web site.  I’m dumping Disqus.  Look for changes in the near future.

We won’t lose any comments.  He wrote his own WordPress plugin to mirror and sync comments from Disqus as soon as they were sent.  I’ve noticed before the couple of times that Disqus went down that the comments were all still there, just without the framework that Disqus provides.  At the time it was a curiosity to me.  Now I’m truly thankful for the job he did.

I don’t need Disqus.  I do make a pittance from the ads, enough to cover the cost of hosting the web site (I also don’t allow my content to be controlled by BlogSpot or any other independently owned operation, so I pay for hosting on a server of my choosing).  My content is mine, and I won’t turn the keys over to anyone else (except one writer whom I had, liked very much, and who quit on me).  Now, I’ll just have to foot the bill for hosting this web site out of pocket, which is between $30 – $40 per month.  It used to be lower, but when they saw the traffic load and band width I used, they called and said that we needed to renegotiate the contract.  So I did.

Whereas this web site was self sustaining, it will now be a net loss.  But I will not allow Disqus to manage my comments in this manner.  It’s a shame that it has to be this way.  It has happened with so many companies it’s hard to count.  Patagonia entered progressive politics, and that nice winter parka I was going to buy from them will hang on the racks.

I don’t even really care enough about Disqus to watch and see what happens to them.  I used a product, and that product failed because of poor management decisions.  It’s a story as old as the hills, but in this case the appurtenances has all the marks of twenty first century America.