One of my early design decisions is to be as lightweight and fast as possible. This means no oauth, no ads, and only core features that you would expect to find in a comment system.
My suggestion would be to make the design more appealing, it looks a little bland now.
And also promote the privacy oriented mission of the service a lot more. Currently there is no mention of privacy/tracking, you only mentioned no ads.
And https is a must in 2017.
Just a few question:
* When do you plan to launch?
* What is the backend built with?
Good luck man.
I'm soft launching with beta users right now.
* What is the backend built with?
Python, Pyramid, SQLAlchemy (which supports PostgreSQL, Mysql, and SQLite3), uWSGI, Nginx, Ubuntu
I don't mind included scripts on my page from huge orgs that have a lot to lose by doing bad things but there aren't that many companies that fall into this (Disqus did, but possible shouldn't ;))
I'm planning on building a business around this service, and reputation will matter. I don't plan to sell out because I eat my own dog food. I built Remarkbox for a personal itch, an itch I feel other people may also have.
For some things, this is true. However you can be sure an entity like Microsoft or Google isn't going to accept a few thousand quid to inject ads or affiliate links into customers websites. A one-man-band that's struggling to turn a profit though, it's less certain. There are a lot of people trying to make a quick buck online and most people have a price.
There are definitely some great things out there being built by small teams that I might miss out on, but that's how it is unless we can tightly control what third party scripts can do on our pages. Sometimes a service will be "so good" that I'll do it anyway, but it's always a trade-off. I don't think most people are as anal about this as me though!