Zeta Global acquires Disqus (YC S07) | Hacker News Reader

Zeta Global acquires Disqus (YC S07)

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217 pointsprostoalex94 comments

All (?) upcoming alternatves to Disqus: (my own listed last)

- Mozilla's Talk, https://github.com/coralproject/talk. Open source, install yourself.

- Discourse, https://www.discourse.org/. One needs to navigate to a separate page, to post a comment. Not threaded. Min $20/month. Open source. Facebook and Gmail login.

- Isso: https://posativ.org/isso/. Open source, install on your own server.

- Commento, https://github.com/adtac/commento. Open source. Moderation, spam-protection and hosting is under development.

- Schnack, https://www.vis4.net/blog/2017/10/hello-schnack/. Open source, install yourself. Has GitHub and Facebook login.

- HostedComments, https://www.hostedcomments.com/. Proprietory. Min $10/month

- Remarbox, https://www.remarkbox.com/. Proprietory. Min $4/month

- Gitalk. https://github.com/gitalk/gitalk. Open source, install yourself. Comments stored as GitHub issues.

- https://github.com/skx/e-comments. Open source, install yourself.

- And my own: EffectiveDiscussions: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments. Open source, or $2 per month. Has Facebook and Gmail login.

A better alternative is to have no comments at all (not joking). If the 'activation energy' of replying is higher, more thought will go into the reply.

I've started emailing people if I like what they've written.

Leads to much better discussions and relationships

Comments are often more interesting than the post itself. Pretty much all of Reddit is based on that notion.

And so is HN, I dare say.

Maybe. There's something like a conservation of interest. The best posts often have very tedious comments. The best comments are often corrections to incorrect articles.

Perhaps that's why we seem to be separating comments out into dedicated sites like Reddit and HN, rather than continuing to host comments directly on blogs?

Interestingly enough, it seems like a lot of blogs these days have entirely disabled comments. I'm not clear on all the reasons why, but definitely noticeable.

Likewise I have noticed higher end consumer products out of luxury boutiques do not show reviews.

Sometimes this is just to avoid spam. I setup a simple API for testing for comment-spam in real-time here:

https://blogspam.net/

As a blogger of 15 years, the issue to me now is that comments almost always take place in Facebook or Twitter, not on my blog.

I blog. Then post the link to social media. I'll get tens or hundreds of comments on social media, but maybe 3 on the blog itself.

Do any of these commenting systems have a way to say, "Any comments that happen on [Facebook/Twitter] should be added to the blog comment thread"?

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-commen...

That's not it. I don't want Facebook comments embedded in my blog. I want comments that were made on Facebook to appear on my blog's native comment system. Outside the walled garden.

what's the average facebook user/friend's incentive to leave a comment on your blog rather than on facebook?

if they leave a comment for you, sure I would put it on the blog. but if people are discussing the article, isn't it easier to do on facebook?

I believe they're imagining a system where any comments on Facebook/Twitter etc would be essentially mirrored.

Perhaps a webhook of sorts that pushes comments discussing a link to the link itself and would then be imported into their own comments database.

Of course, I doubt Facebook would do this seeing as there's no tangible benefit to them

What's troublesome about systems like that is they invariably end up pulling FB's tracking code onto your blog.

Right, we don't want that.

I think it's technically possible to do the following:

1. I, as the blog owner, authorize this Facebook app to access my Facebook page.

2. I tell the Facebook app the URL of my blog.

3. That Facebook app watches my Facebook page for any posts linking to my blog.

4. When it detects a post on my page linking to my blog, it scans the comments of that post and automatically re-posts those comment to my blog's native comment system, outside the FB walled garden.

Ditto for a Twitter-authorized app.

This way, all the comments about my original content stick with the original content, rather than bound up in walled gardens.

While this all is technically possible, it probably breaks Facebook's terms of service.

What if I want to reply to a comment that was made on Facebook? How would the user be notified?

The Facebook app should sync comments on Facebook with those on the blog.

So, you could just reply on Facebook, which would then automatically get posted to the blog.

As for the other way around, when a reply is posted on the blog to a comment that was imported from Facebook, I think the FB app could handle that too, and post a reply to the Facebook thread: "Joe Foobar posted a reply to you here: [link to comment on blog]"

I don't think any commenting system has that feature. You're thinking about something that automatically integrated with FB/Twitter/etc? So if someone posts a comment about your blog post at FB, it appears on your blog too? (I saw your reply & clarification to someone else below.) I suppose if there was a way to do that, FB and Twitter would dedicate some time to stop & prevent & break that feature, because they want the discussion to happen at their place instead :- (

Maybe a text message asking the user to please cross post, could do some good? (but not much I suppose)

I've been thinking about if FB, Twitter, etc could be used as notification systems, so, if someone, X, posted a comment at the blog, and someone replied a few days later — then X got a notification via Facebook or Twitter. I had a quick look but didn't find a way to do that via FB. (Because then higher likelihood that people go back to the blog, reply, and continue discussing with each other.)

I was going to ask what blog commenting system you use, and say that if you added Facebook or Gmail login, maybe more people would post comments, since they wouldn't need to sign up and create an account, just to post a comment. — But now I had a look at a blog linked via your profile, and I see you already have FB and Gmail login.

Well, the technology is there already, with Webmention support.

https://indieweb.org/Webmention

I have these enabled on my own blog via the WordPress Bridgy plugin, which can report back on links to your article from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Flickr.

https://indieweb.org/Bridgy

I doubt any of these "Disqus-like" services support this, because it sounds like it's solving a different problem. (Although it'd be useful if they did support it, the way earlier blogging systems display "pingbacks" as if they were comments.

This was interesting :- )

Doesn't seem to work so well with Facebook to me? If I write a blog post and use Brid.gy: I'm getting the impression Brid.gy (https://brid.gy/) only lets me see [mentions about the blog post] that my Facebook account can see? If there's a public discussion about the blog post, somewhere at Facebook in a group of people I'm not connected with — then Brid.gy won't find it?

Is that how it works in general? I mean, the blog & web-mentions tech, will find web-mentions, only about things the blog author can see, via his/her own social media accounts? I'm then getting the feeling that ... if a blog gets popular, shared and discussed a lot at Facebook etc, 99% of all discussions & shares etc, won't be found, because the blog author isn't connected to those people on the relevant social media places. (?)

Webmention is quite a cool tech, though it seems to have a very low adoption outside the indieweb community. The validation tool seems to be broken too [0] [1] and a lack of compliance [2] in the community. It's probably also not good that there is only one test suite, I'd feel more comfy if I could validate against more independent suites.

[0] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.rocks/issues/26

[1] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.rocks/issues/32

[2] https://github.com/aaronpk/webmention.rocks/issues/27

There is an API of sorts that pings your blog if it gets published to eg; Hacker News but I can't remember the name currently.

It's opt in and I think Lobsters uses it? Anyway, it's not exactly what you're after as it wouldn't ping you about individual comments, just threads in general

just for completion's sake:

most people that use a service such as disqus use it in tandem with a static blog hosted on maybe github, gitlab or whatnot and these have a really neat alternative to this setup, and that's actually committing the comments automatically instead of serving them through js.

there is a FOSS appliance for just that, and it even offers a free hosted service

https://staticman.net/

Interesting :- ) That one should have been in the list too yes. — I'd be worried about Denial-of-Service attacks & moderation. What if the blog gets popular? And "angry people" posts 9999 spammy comments. Even if one deletes them from the blog, they'd sill be in the commit history? (but I want a somewhat clean commit history that is readable to me)

And what if someone illegally post personally-identifiable-info (PII), even if one deletes it, it'd still be in the commit log, which I think would be illegal? Maybe StaticMan could rewrite the Git history to delete flagged & deleted comments (e.g. comments with PII)... But if it does that, the rebased history will cause problems when you try to push your next blog post to the repo.

Maybe if blog comments were in a separate repository whose history could be rewritten, without interfering with the main repo to which one pushes one's new blog comments.

Staticman supports GitHub PRs so you can vet/flag/delete comments as a PR and they don't end up in main branch commit history if you don't merge the PR. If you delete the PR branch eventually git gc in sync with GitHub's branch cleanup process will cleanup the dead commits, so there's a window when where that PII will be available, but it would eventually get tossed.

Ok, that seems like a lot safer, thanks for explaining

isso hasn't seen releases in a while https://github.com/posativ/isso/releases

I can recommend Isso, it's rather easy to install and use.

It also seems like the project is working on a moderation UI, I'm waiting on that.

Congrats to Jason and Daniel!

It's hard as hell working on a startup for 10 years, and their team's consistent commitment is so impressive.

My first startup was YC W08, Tipjoy. We were just two people, my wife and I. I feel lucky to have shared an office with Disqus way back in 2008. Besides the founders, they and an engineer and an engineering intern. It was a great vibe in the office.

In that time since, I've shut down a startup, worked at two unicorns, started my 2nd startup, and just sold it. Time is voracious. This really highlights the marathon sprint Disqus has been through.

hear hear. congrats guys!

An acquisition was pretty much an expected outcome since there was no way a company with $10.5 million in VC funding over 10 years could go public. IMO the comments as a service space is a terrible fit for the VC model. It's easy to get to scale by offering a free service, but very very hard to monetize. You can force ads on your users, but you end up being at the receiving end of users' wrath, as was the case with Disqus.

I've tried talking to VCs with the idea for a Disqus alternative [0] and many of them shared the same concern : market size. It's tiny. A back of the envelope calculation gives me a number between $100 million and $200 million in ARR potential with most of the revenue being generated via ads instead of paid subscriptions. Disqus serves 17 billion monthly pageviews which translates to roughly $1.7 million in MRR. So yeah, I guess this space is more suited for the artisanal variety (bootstrapped companies) than the VC model. Another guy who's been working on an alternative for 3 years is `foxhop with Remarkbox [1].

[0] https://www.hostedcomments.com/

[1] https://www.remarkbox.com/

In that case, a $90M exit is extremely impressive. The data must be very valuable to drive that valuation.

I just spoke with someone that works with Zeta (former XL Media). She said its not about the data they have but rather how they can run their existing AI over keyboard's of millions of users. 30% of US based browsers have some sort of zeta cookie on their PC.. knowing what they type about is priceless.

>Marketing tech company Zeta Global...

Add this to uBlock Origin's "My Rules" tab to block Disqus comments on all sites:

  * disqus.com * block
  * disquscdn.com * block

Privacy Badger works as well.

Important detail: this will work only if "advanced user mode" is enabled.

Ghostery will also block disqus if you have the Commenting tracker section selected.

That's why I use a whitelist instead

Is Disqus not already blocked by some of the lists that uBO uses? That would surprise me.

For a marketing and ads company, any script that's embedded on multiple websites is an attractive target for acquisition.

There's nothing terribly special about Disqus in this regard: they just have a decent install base. Some lip service fluff about AI/ML mining the comments for sentiment, likely to give the impression for ad sellers that they can target specific demographics, but this is something they can fake -- grouping user cohorts solely by the overlap of sites they visit is an adequate proxy.

It does, however, show that Disqus' business model was the usual fantasy: burn cash to acquire users, coast by waiting for an acqui-hire until you're desperate, then introduce ads, hemorrhage users, then firesale cash out. This is a tried-and-true strategy for many web properties, from image hosts to chat services, but it truly doesn't make sense here, because you'd figure that their subscription plans should've been priced high enough to pay the bills. They badly misjudged their market.

>Disqus gives these marketers the ability to target users based on their interests. You can infer quite a bit about people simply based on which sites they comment on, after all.

So we can expect more targeted ads in Disqus embeds from mining user patterns. The platform is a already a mess; between making 105 network requests to 20+ domains associated with tracking, malware, ad platforms, and shady fingerprinting services, and the fact that adding Disqus costs you upwards of 6 seconds [0], this announcement is making things more user-hostile.

Disclosure: I created an open-source, privacy-focused alternative called Commento [1] so my views on Disqus might be somewhat biased :)

I will also be offering it as a subscription-based service very soon as many people have asked me for one (the open source version will stay free software forever). It'll have near feature-parity with Disqus and you'll have the option to import all your Disqus comments. If you're interested in beta-testing, please let me know (email in profile). Apologies if I'm breaking HN etiquette.

[0] http://donw.io/post/github-comments/

[1] https://github.com/adtac/commento

Nit: I think you mean "disclosure", not "disclaimer". I don't usually correct this, but to me the poster seems less legitimate saying disclaim when they mean to disclose a conflict of interest.

Heh, thanks for pointing that out; much appreciated. I confuse the two words sometimes. Edited.

There was this incident I documented a while back as well.

https://medium.com/patrickleenyc/beware-of-disqus-17fb58cfab...

Thanks, just what I've been looking for

damn, i'm still using Disqus so thanks! I will give your service a try

> recent $140 million Series F funding round

Series F?! Heh. It's amazing that Disqus is worth anything at all. Standard Wordpress spam filtering takes care of bots on low-traffic sites, and the friction of yet another pile of tracking junk seems high enough to dissuade people from commenting, or "engaging with your brand," or whatever it's called.

Two things:

1. I think you may have meant to post that as a top-level comment, not as a reply to me.

2. The Series F was for Zeta Global, not Disqus.

1. No, I meant it as a tangential reply to your comment.

2. Yes. I think it's crazy that an ad-tech firm is using its sixth round of funding to buy a worthless comment/tracking widget.

Yeah, I didn't even know there was a Series F. I thought there's Series A, B, and maybe C. That's it.

Commento \o/ This is something really neat, thanks!

Good to know that Mozilla has a similar project, although it's self-hosted: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

Neat ! I wanted to add a comment section on my personal blog but I didn't want to use Disqus for privacy reason. I tried using Isso[1] but installing it on my server is really a PITA (I don't know the Python ecosystem, is it always such a mess ?). I was on the verge of developing my own commenting system in Rust, so I can have a stand-alone binary for ease of installation, but Go has the same property, which makes your system really attractive, thanks !

[1]: https://posativ.org/isso/

Edit: from the readme

> if you're going down the self-hosting route, using Docker to run Commento is recommended.

Why ? What would be the problem with distributing a binary ?

Thanks! You can find the latest amd64 binary releases here: https://github.com/adtac/commento/releases

About the docker part: I should edit that. I wasn't making point releases back when I wrote it and docker was the easiest way to get it running back then.

OT.

Thanks for being pro-freedom (pro-privacy), but you are selling a privacy-respecting system and your name is "Adtac"?

For privacy-conscious out there, anything with "ad" in its name screams "acceptable ads"/shady advertising corp masquerading as a privacy company.

Well my real name starts with "ad", so I'm not sure what I can do about that :D

My first name is Adhityaa, and my initial is C. So if you try saying adtac (the alphabets), you'll roughly pronounce my name with the initial.

While you're here, I'd like to introduce you to our latest offer where- /s

Thanks for creating Commento. I tried the demo- it looks excellent. I'm sure I'll be using it somewhere soon.

Hey, I like your solution; adding some kind of id management like oauth would make it perfect, I think.

>Disqus gives these marketers the ability to target users based on their interests. You can infer quite a bit about people simply based on which sites they comment on, after all.

Not only that but also they will get a partial browsing history (on subset of websites with embedded Disqus comments) of users which have third-party cookies allowed.

Mozilla, NY Times, Washington Post & others have contributed to creating the Coral Project which looks like it has a much better comment system for websites to use. It's no where near as easy to use but you can get it up & running with Docker pretty quick if you know how to use Docker. If you have a larger audience, the engagement features really seem worth the effort.

https://coralproject.net/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/index.html

A source close to the two companies tells us that the acquisition price was close to $90 million. This marks Zeta’s eleventh acquisition since it was founded in 2007.

Apparears adding ads worked out well for them. However distasteful most of us think they are, obviously they were able to get some non trivial monetization from them.

There are a lot of competing services and projects around, it's a mystery to me why none of them have gotten any traction yet. It's also fairly trivial to self host an opensource comment system, or roll your own. Does anyone here have any insight into why this isn't a more popular option?

I think this is mostly due to services like Disqus targeting the CMS space like WordPress or Squarespace heavily, while at the same time making deals with established online presences like online newspapers, etc. Essentially, while it may seem trivial to you or me, we aren't their target user, they want low hanging user fruit. Eg, copypasta this one line and it all works!

All comments now sold?! Somebody/we need to focus on self hosting JS comment system like isso but more user friendly and less paranoia (Gravatar and social media support and email notifications). Still have not seen any good comment system self hosted... the best is maybe Wordpress but even with Jetpack it's not as good as Disqus IMHO. Talk by Mozilla looked promising (but I did not liked the UI design too much) but it requires registering/sign in. Any alternatives?

Idea: Send comments as e-mail plus save it in cookie, so when the commenter reads the comments he sees his/her comment. Then a moderator or blog owner hooks his CMS or static site generator into the e-mail program/service and he/she can also reply to comments by replying to the e-mail! Or delete the comment by deleting the e-mail. He/she could use a dedicated e-mail box like comments@yourdomain.com. It would even work without JavaScript (form action mailto)! And no server required except a e-mail service.

How will commenters submit their comments? Would they be required to enter their email? Or are you implying an email address would be generated for them to associate with their activity/comment chain?

  <form action="mailto:comments@yourdomain.com">
    <input type="hidden" name="subject" value="A new comment on the thingy" />
    <textarea name="body" rows="10" cols="41"></textarea><br>
    <button type="submit">Submit comment</button>
  </form>

When the form is submitted the default mail program will be started, subject will be the subject and body will be the body. Now assuming the user does have a e-mail client, all he/she has to do is to click send.

You can then read, delete, and reply to comments, and even send private replies, all via your e-mail client. Then you add the comments to your web-site either manually, or have a script do it automatically.

Startup idea: application that automatically syndicates comment threads in your email inbox back to your website.

I've been doing something like this, but cruder (no cookie) on my personal site for some years: https://lee-phillips.org/. I like to be able to decide if a comment is useful for my readers before including it on the page.

I'm developing embedded comments open source & track and add free, demo: (it looks a bit unusual :- )) https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments/

read more about it & install it: (there's hosting) https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments

If you like HN, you might like these improvements it has over HN: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...

Also see another comment I posted above that lists all (?) alternatives to Disqus: search for "upcoming alternatves" on this page.

looks great.

This really puts into perspective of what kind of moat facebook has and just how much overlap there is with companies like Disqus.

Personally, I like Disqus because you aren't required to log in to one specific social media account and integrating it with your site is pretty easy.

Effective Discussions (ED) is an open source & track free & ad free alternative to Disqus. There's €2 per month hosting too, if you don't want to maintain your own server.

Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (scroll down. that's a static Gatsby.js blog).

ED is inspired by HN, and I'm adding some new & unique features that I think HN & Disqus would have needed, demo:

https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can...

If you want to start using it — a beta version is available — go here: (that page isn't finished yet)

https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments

(I'm developing it.)

I deleted my disqus after they installed ads a few months back. I am not anti-ads but these ads were very distasteful (ie shady stuff like weight loss products)

I'm pretty sure they are only visible on default setting, it's possible to turn them off.

They also have a paid version where no ads are shown.

We have being trying to sign up for the paid version but didn't manage to. The ads did disappear but we're not sure why.

And... Disqus account deleted.

1) I never used it much anyway.

2) SO glad I created an account and didn't link my Facebook!

I recently stumbled over commento

https://github.com/adtac/commento

"A lightweight, privacy-focussed comment engine alternative to Disqus."

You can easily host it yourself.

There's a live demo at https://commento.adtac.pw/

This is one of the few occasions when you hope that an acquired service actually is shutdown. I wish they'd sold to Yahoo.

It's a pity since they provided nice commenting platform, much lesser evil than Facebook comments.

Was seriously gaining traction on politics sites since all trolling will reliably drown, and you could ban annoying people on per person basis. If only they also solve how to drown undesirable downthread comments...

Instructions on how to export your Disqus comments:

https://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/1104797-imp...

Discourse could be a nice alternative as it can be self hosted and plays nice with WordPress. [1]

[1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-discourse/

I'm building an alternative called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com). Please check it out, a major promise is no advertisements or tracking.

How are you making money?

By asking my customers for money.

I just deleted my Disqus account, thanks for heads up.

I assume I won't be invited to game nights in the future.

It was fun, Disqus. Best wishes for everyone. I had a pretty good interview once. Too bad our values didn't align.

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