stick a comment section on your website and some saddo somewhere will frequent it

Fair enough.. that, or hosting a LamerNews (HN Clone) instance... you get so many drive by spam posts, even just text, it isn't funny. Hard to imagine how bad it can get with images.

On the flip side, it's a real shame so many sites/pages removed comment sections... I had hope for a while that a browser extension for some sort of social media could fill the gap. There was a "free speech" one that had the feature, but the community itself was pretty bad, and there was no comments/shares on the rather technical sites I tend to visit.

Need some sort of cohesion to fill the gap in some way. I saw a bluesky implementation for comments, that used the social media itself in a shared post's replies as comments, which was interesting.