You asked (slash begged, slash demanded): we listened. Comments are now available on Buttondown!
Give it a whirl by adding a cute lil comment to our latest newsletter.
We've been historically reticent to build comments, for a number of reasons:
- Comments are tricky to get right. They're a great way to build community, but can require a lot of moderation and care on the part of the author to make sure everyone is being respectful and kind.
- At Buttondown, the relationship between you and your subscribers is paramount, and comments can sometimes feel like a slippery slope towards building a social graph (and making subscribers think about "Buttondown", rather than about you.)
- Many Buttondown authors aren't using Buttondown's archive pages at all, which means they miss out on commenting altogether.
But we're quite happy with the design and approach we landed on. Central to our philosophy is that comments should be optional and opt-in: you can turn them on or off on a per-newsletter basis, and you can choose to moderate them or not.
They're also portable and integrate well with everything else you're doing, either within Buttondown or outside of it. You can export all of your comments as a CSV, and you can also integrate them into your own website using our API, and you can fire webhooks or automations based on new comments.
Comments are available on our Basic plan and higher and require you to use the fancy new modern archive pages. (If you're not already, you should be using them! They're great!)