Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to A commenting system that works via email
Hi everyone, I made a commenting system that accepts submissions via email, instead of requiring a login. The back story is I wanted some interactivity for my site/blog, but I felt like requiring a signup wouldn't be a good UX. I'm looking to get feedback on it from the HN community. Please feel free to ask questions and let me know your thoughts, especially what you don't like about it. If it's a decent UX then I would like to make it OSS, as I feel that it could potentially fill a void, especially for beautiful small websites. Here's the basic flow of data: 1. When the site is…
This is a commenting system that lets visitors submit comments via email instead of requiring account creation or login. When someone clicks a comment link on a website, their email client opens with pre-written… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. A commenting system that works via email launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Comment without any sign-up process
2024 · commented.io · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! Just for fun, I built an interactive Hacker News Simulator. You can submit text posts and links, just like the real HN. But on HN Simulator, all of the comments are generated by LLMs + generate instantly. The best way to use it (IMHO) is to submit a text post or a curl-able URL here: https://news.ysimulator.run/submit. You don't need an account to post. When you do that, various prompts will be built from a library of commenter archetypes, moods, and shapes. The AI commenters will actually respond to your text post and/or submitted link. I really wanted it to feel…
Nov 2025 · news.ysimulator.run · its alternatives →
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Commentblocks▲101Hey HN, I'm a freelance web developer and got tired of the endless email chains during website QA. Clients would send screenshots with red circles, or worse, Word docs with "the button on the page with the thing." I'd spend more time decoding feedback than actually fixing stuff. So I built Commentblocks. You add a script to your staging site, send clients a link, and they click anywhere on the page to leave a comment. That's it. No signup for them, no explaining how to use it. Each comment captures the exact element, viewport size, browser, and URL. Comments show up in a dashboard or can go…
Feb 2026 · commentblocks.com · its alternatives →
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I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
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A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
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2016 · comments.network · its alternatives →
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- 8RH
2021 · remarkbox.com · its alternatives →
- 9FC
I've been working on creating threaded blog posts using RSS feeds. Something similar to Twitter but kind of worse and better in its own way. I had an idea that if users are allowed to embed the threads to their posts, it acts like a simple comment section. Try it out, no accounts required.
2024 · blog.bhread.com · its alternatives →
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Simple Commenter▲212Hey HN, I'm Aleksander, and I built Simple Commenter to solve a problem I faced as a freelance web developer. This tool simplifies client feedback by allowing comments directly on your website with just one line of code. It works seamlessly with platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow. The backend is user-friendly, making comment management easy. If you're dealing with similar challenges, check it out!
2024 · simplecommenter.com · its alternatives →
- 11HR
2016 · hnreplies.com · its alternatives →
- 12AW
I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...
2012 · its alternatives →
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Hosted commenting that's painless to embed, a pleasure to use, and a breeze to moderate.
2018 · commentbox.io · its alternatives →
- 14CA
2019 · commento.io · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…
2025 · app.camelai.com · its alternatives →
- 17FH
Hi HN! I’ve been lurking for a while, but out of fear of being steamrolled by HN readers or maybe just natural introversion, I’ve always been too scared to post or comment. Which is why 1. this is my first real Hacker News submission 2. my friend Michael and I built "Fake" Hacker News, a place to post and see what AI-generated HN comments might say. Here’s a video of me using fakeHN to test this very submission: https://www.loom.com/share/4b9f4f9d7c77489a86baeb92ec55a1ed?... And an example of one of our generated posts:…
2023 · fakehn.com · its alternatives →
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CommentBox.io▲120A beautiful, ad-free alternative to Disqus.
2018 · commentbox.io · its alternatives →
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remark42▲72Remark42 is a self-hosted, lightweight commenting system
2021 · remark42.com · its alternatives →
- 21IR
2018 · hn.walzr.com · its alternatives →
- 22
2 months ago I launched a service that sends email alerts when you get a new comment/reply on Hacker News. I've only been able to acquire 6 users since releasing it (°ー°〃) I tried promoting it here (duuh), Reddit, and LinkedIn. Optimized it for SEO (ranking 3rd on my target keywords). All with limited success. So I've decided to open-source it! Links to... - frontend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-fronten... - backend: https://github.com/mihailthebuilder/hackernewsalerts-backend I'm still using it for myself, since there's…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I hacked a simple service for gathering HN replies and organizing them by the parent's username. The main idea is to be able to efficiently get the latest replies to an HN user. For example, you can use this service to send yourself notifications when some replies to you on HN. The service queries the official HN API and can be self-hosted. It is basically ~30 lines of Bash script. I made this mostly for educational purposes -- thought you might find it useful for something. Cheers! Edit: for example, here are the latest replies to me [0]. It includes only recent replies, since I…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24BC
Disqus alternative. License: AGPL. Uses a bit much memory (2 GB min, 4 better), should be possible to get below 0.5 GB if pre-compiling JVM stuff. There's SaaS hosting. Long term (2027+ ?), the idea is that inactive blogs (those that don't get comments) pay 1? 2? EUR / month. Then, one wouldn't need to feel stressed up about having an inactive blog — it'd cost about the same as the domain name. Previously on HN: (as you can see, I've been working on this for a while — had another job in between, and, sleepiness health problems, making things take longer, plus, being generally clueless…
2025 · blog-comments.talkyard.io · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Public Commenting by Commented alternatives
- I built an interactive HN Simulator alternatives
- Commentblocks alternatives
- Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments alternatives
- I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind alternatives
- Embed HN comments in your website alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →