It’s Time To Disqus (YC S07) Our Community

They can be hidden via CSS very easily. .dsq-options { display:none } Boom, gone!

Their implementation is very clean. Especially compared to past implementations, which were rife with buttons and links and all manner of interface foolishness. Every comment has only a few elements to it now: A user header, the comment itself, a like button, and a reply button. The reply screen is fantastically simple and can be further stripped down via CSS if you would like.

I don't get what you have against liking comments. It's the same thing as what goes on here, just without a downvoting mechanism. It surfaces quality content to the top in a democratic way.

Look at it in the context of the whole page. TechCrunch, like a lot of blogs, has a ton of "stuff" going on throughout the page. Compared to the ads on the article, the Crunchbase boxes, and the multiple areas of navigation on the site, the comments are relatively benign and simplistic. They've done a great job packing a lot of complex functionality into a clean package. I think it's already the killer app.

We work hard to improve our default theme offering, Narcissus, with every release. Narcissus is designed to look good and perform well in all situations. A consequence of this all-encompassing approach is that in some situations the look can come across as a bit cluttered.

However with only a few lines of CSS you can transform Narcissus to fit the needs of your site--just like Engadget, Thoughtbot and many others have so eloquently done.

Saying this, we hear you. There is definitely a need for a minimalist theme at Disqus and we have some time set aside in the near future to make it happen.

The fact - hackers often neglect usability and graphic design, sadly Disqus is an example. Clean minimalist design separates them from a killer app.

I remember reading a comment on Hacker News about Google waiting for 5 seconds before indexing the current DOM. I couldn't find any confirmation for this, other that the current Google Bot, Caffeine, is interpreting some of the Javascript code found on webpages.

I completely disagree, and I'm getting a big "Not Invented Here" vibe.

Disqus comments are excellent. They handle comment threading, email notifications, voting, login (with your choice of about 5 providers), moderation, spam control... the list goes on and on.

Disqus manages all this while making everything look good.

I use disqus on my blog, because I've got better things to do than reinvent the wheel, especially when there's some extremely polished commodity wheels. It would take me months to implement all the functionality disqus gives me for free.

>Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

Depends on the focus of the site. Fact is, packages like VBulletin are very good at what they do, and I find I generally have a more pleasant experience on VB/phpBB powered sites that behave like other forums I visit than I do on sites that try to reinvent the wheel and end up lacking basic functionality just to be different.

There are many things I disagree with in your comment.

Firstly, TechCrunch is not primarily about the TechCrunch community. It's unlike Hacker News in that way. Hacker News exists to talk about interesting articles; TechCrunch is a newspaper - it exists to write them. So for them, commenting is a commodity.

Secondly, I think your views on CMSs are a very bad strategy (a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, which is bad). They're also wrong - I don't think CMSs looks are generic at all. At least not with a decent CMS, which you can theme. Wordpress, for example, can be made to look completely different from one site to the next.

Lastly, I think you're missing the obvious tradeoff involved. Sure, you're more limited by creating a site using a CMS, but then it's also a lot harder.

You must find a balance though. I would prefer a canned comment solution with good discussion over a unique and hand coded comment system, with flame wars and trolling any day. As for using a cms, it really depends on what cms you use I suppose. Coming from a wordpress background, I can say I am often surprised as to what sites are using wordpress in what ways. While some CMS's restrain you to certain looks etc, (if only due to difficulty of customization) others allow you almost infinite customization. As for Tumblr, the rigid theme guideline and review process, the small (when compared to competing products) selection of themes, and the resulting quality of the themes are part of their unique and yet similar ecosystem and it is part of their image, whether its for the best or not, it seems to be working for them.

I think that's true, at least where the content of the discussion takes a back seat to the bells & whistles.

"Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site"."

Load up TechCrunch's homepage with Firebug open and behold the horrors it holds. It is, by far, the most cringe-inducing contemporary site, and it's the single worst example to demonstrate Firefox being brought to a crawl (Chrome deals with its freak show more elegantly).

They may cover technology, but their site shows little technical competence.

To be fair, a good percentage of the issue is the viral spread of page contaminating twitter and facebook junk.

The big selling point for Disqus is the back-end management system. Disqus is AWESOME at managing your commenters, killing spam and the like. If comments are not your core competency (e.g. Digg or Reddit or HN) then Disqus is a very attractive option.

You look at forums as a good example?

IMO, forums are the first thing that needs to be fixed. Stack Overflow/Hacker News have shown us how much better information is when it's organized using tags, comments and the like. And yet, every day, I stumble into some old phpBB, which is terribly organized and impossible to find information in! Splitting up a forum into 10 different areas is so terrible - before I even start seeing information, I already have to understand how everything works and is organized, etc.

I've been waiting a long time for some startup to implement a modern forum system that actually works.

FWIW, at Disqus we've tried making registration as easy as possible. You're also able to show and hide children, though not all sites enabled this. We're also looking to improve notifications, so that area is definitely on our radar.

I don't understand why this is downvoted. Is everybody satisfied with how the majority of commenting systems work? Do I just have high standards?

HN, is the best commenting on the Internet, not even close. The minimalist design and usability is superb, there is no match for HN comments period.