Why Disqus will be huge | Hacker News Reader

Why Disqus will be huge

anzman.blogspot.com

9 pointsechair6 comments

I'm not being pig-headed, but honestly, I have yet to hear a good reason why I should switch to a system where I'm no longer in control of my comments and don't get any of their SEO value.

I spent years building up my blog and its readership, I've worked really hard to get the people making the comments, and I've spent a hell of a lot of work writing the story that gets people to comment... but I don't get the Google search results, I don't get why anyone would want to part with such an important asset.

IMHO, with Disqus, the blog author always loses.

Disqus only manages other people's comments. You're the blogger so as far as your comments are concerned you lose neither control or SEO value.

That is unless you were counting other people's comments as yours.

Looking closer, it appears you spent "years" to build up the following 5 items in the NeoSmart files:

  Richard Stallman Attacks the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (83 comments)
  Possible Severe Gmail Security Vulnerability (Updated) (8 comments)
  OS X Snow Leopard to Use ULE Scheduler? (8 comments)
  Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog (86 comments)
  Shipping Seven is a Fraud. (36 comments)

A quick glance shows that there is about 4 times as much user-contributed content as the content you wrote and the most discussed posts (presumably the ones you "worked really hard" at) are flamebait, including the recent Stallman item that spilled over into Hacker News.

>You're the blogger so as far as your comments are concerned you lose neither control or SEO value.

This is very different than the current model, so you can understand why people would want to maintain the status quo. As far as SEO goes, Disqus is decidedly worse, even if it is a good idea to allow people to manage their comments.

I have mixed feelings about Disqus.

- my JS is turned off so I can't see Disqus comments

+ keeping JS turned off reduces a lot of Disqus blog comment noise

- Disqus presumably hurts blog comment SEO

+ none of the quality blogs I read care about blog comment SEO (they don't even have ads)

+ Disqus presumably could easily add useful features later, probably faster than individual bloggers would.

- Disqus comments are managed by one organization, with all the inherent problems (availability, security, privacy, ...)

I think I'd be more interested in them if they supported a way of pushing static HTML comment pages to third parties that both the blogger and the commenter could choose.

Your choice of username is interesting. To me, a computer guru is someone like Guy Steele or Don Knuth. Did you choose that handle in jest?

Disqus is great. I switched blogging software so that I could have out of the box Disqus integration.

I hope they take their competitive advantage (they're just a little bit better than the alternatives) and sustain it.

FriendFeed and others are catching up, but I suspect with their heavy hitting VCs guiding them, they'll stay ahead of the pack.

I particularly like their open attitude about downtime and service quality. When they screw up, they post about it on their blog, apologize, and explain how they're getting better. This appears to be one item in the recipe for success.

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