Switching to Utterances from Disqus for comments
I got an email from Disqus today. It turns out, my blog is not super popular and the ad revenue from this blog couldn't sustain my Disqus usage. I didn't really have many comments or reacts anyway, and most of them were from my girlfriend, so I decided to replace them in place with Utterances. Sorry to anyone who did react/comment to my articles and got their content deleted.
I think Utterances is a great solution to comments, I had thought about starting out my blog with it, but I thought Disqus would be free for me. Ultimately, I'm glad I switched over because Disqus would have been bloated and was apparently serving ads to readers. And out of the alternatives I found, it was only one that allowed me to keep my blog serverless (as it were).
It didn't work completely out of the box for my hugo theme but was really so easy to install. I just had to search for disqus
in my theme and replace it with the handy script
tag generated from their website. It was a bit unintuitive at first because I was not too experienced with Repo settings on Github, but I was able to eventually figure out that you were supposed to input your information on the form and copy the code on the bottom. It's really great product and I'm very thankful to the developers for making such a clean, easy-to-use, alternative for comments!