Your users want to interact. Your roadmap doesn't have weeks to spare.

Most teams don't avoid building it because they can't — they avoid it because it's a distraction. Comments, moderation, notifications, reactions: none of that is what makes their product defensible. It's table stakes that users expect, and building it in-house means months of engineering time spent on something that won't differentiate you in the market.

Look at the media industry: most major news websites — from regional outlets to large editorial brands — run third-party commenting solutions. They didn't build their own. And these are companies with engineering teams, resources, and a product where community engagement is core to the experience. If it made sense for them to build it, they would have.

This is especially true at the early stage. If you're building an MVP and testing the market, your only job is to validate — not to rebuild infrastructure that already exists. The same reason you reach for Stripe instead of building your own payment gateway, or Algolia instead of rolling your own search, applies here. Get to market faster, learn from real users, and build in-house later if and when it actually makes sense.

The Stripe parallel holds on the other end too. Payments are critical to a business, but no one calls custom-built payments a competitive advantage. The same logic applies to social infrastructure — your moat is your core product, not the comment section around it.