Comments

Relevant points [of disabling Disqus] are:

• Load-time goes from 6 seconds to 2 seconds.
• There are 105 network requests vs. 16.
• There are a lot of non-relevant requests going through to networks that will be tracking your movements.

Among the networks you can find:

• disqus.com - Obviously!
• google-analytics.com - Multiple requests; no idea who’s capturing your movements.
• connect.facebook.net - If you’re logged into Facebook, they know you visit this site.
• accounts.google.com - Google will also map your visits to this site with any of your Google accounts.
• pippio.com - LiveRamp identify mapping for harvesting your details for commercial gain.
• bluekai.com - Identity tracking for marketing campaigns.
• crwdcntrl.net - Pretty suspect site listed as referenced by viruses and spyware.
• exelator.com - More identity and movement tracking site which even has a virus named after it!
• doubleclick.net - We all know this one: ad services and movement tracking, owned by Google.
• tag.apxlv.net - Very shady and tricky to pin-point an owner as they obsfuscate their domain (I didn’t even know this was a thing!). Adds a tracking pixel to your site.
• adnxs.com - More tracking garbage, albeit slightly more prolific.
• adsymptotic.com - Advertising and tracking that suppposedly uses machine learning.
• rlcdn.com - Obsfuscated advertising/tracking from Rapleaf.
• adbrn.com - “Deliver a personalized customer journey across devices, channels and platforms with Adbrain customer ID mapping technology.”
• nexac.com - Oracle’s Datalogix, their own tracking and behavioural pattern rubbish.
• tapad.com - OK, I cant’t be bothered to search to look this up anymore.
• liadm.com - More? Oh, ok, then…
• sohern.com - Yup. Tracking.
• demdex.net - Tracking. From Adobe.
• bidswitch.net - I’ll give you one guess…
• agkn.com - …
• mathtag.com - Curious name, maybe it’s… no. It’s tracking you.

I can’t visit many of these sites because I have them blocked in uBlock Origin so information was gleaned from google crawl results of the webpages and 3rd parties. Needless to say, it’s a pretty disgusting insight into how certain free products turn you into the product. What’s more worrying are the services that go to lengths to hide who they are and what their purposes are for tracking your movements.

Many have tried over the years to bring us web annotations. The lack of standards has been one of the key things holding these efforts back– a need we highlighted in the first of our 12 original principles back in 2013 and have been working towards ever since.

Yesterday, on February 23, things took a giant leap forward when the W3C, the standards body for the Web, standardized annotation.

Twenty four years after Marc Andreessen first built collaborative annotation into Mosaic and tested it on a few “guinea pigs” before turning it off, annotations have finally become first-class citizens of the web.

From the W3C Web Annotation co-chairs, Rob Sanderson and Tim Cole:

“Many websites already allow comments, but current […] systems rely on unique, usually proprietary technologies chosen and provided by publishers. Notes cannot be shared easily across the Web and comments about a Web page can only be saved and viewed via a single website. Readers cannot select their own tools, choose their own service providers or bring their own communities.”

 

So what exactly does this mean for you?

Comment widgets may soon become a thing of the past.

The W3C standards (called Recommendations) are a key milestone towards a future in which all pages could support rich layers of conversation without requiring any action by their publishers—because that capability can be built into the browser itself and be available as a native feature, just like web search. The shared vision is that conversations will be able happen anywhere on the Web, or even on documents in native apps, and inline instead of below-the fold, in a federated, standards-based way.