Disqus launches new website | Hacker News Reader

Disqus launches new website

blog.disqus.com

19 pointszeeg9 comments

The new wibble-wobble of the bubbles distract me a lot. Ask yourself, "What is Disqus?"

Found by scrolling down:

"If you’re passionate about writing and sharing, Disqus helps you build a community of active readers and commenters."

So...what is it? Compare that to the previous version that immediately placed it front and center: "We're a comment widget you can easily drop into any site."

I wonder if this will hurt their adoption numbers.

Occurred to us too. We're experimenting a bit with how we're communicating to our intended audience.

We've been testing signup rates and nothing alarming to note yet!

> How is everything now free? Disqus’ business now centers around new advertising built on top of content discovery.

I appreciate they needed a business model but when they launched this it was auto opt-in and enabled by default. I had dozens of clients email me complaining about 'weird ads' appearing on their sites, all mostly completely unrelated to what they had written or their site category etc (some of the clients who were female even complained about links to lad-mag style content, pictures of busty women etc, they were very offended). It felt like a really dirty trick and I have since migrated all Disqus installs to other solutions, mostly self-hosted comments. I would be very wary to trust them again given their history.

Sorry about that. We made some mistakes when rolling out from scratch and did some things that I'd be more careful about now. There was no malice intended and hope that you'll take another look in the future.

Thanks for responding, it is good to hear you recognised there were some mistakes and it has changed how you will do things going forward. I appreciate that you needed to explore revenue models and believe you when you say no malice was intended, I always thought of you as a good company. Unfortunately at the time I couldn't give definitive answers to my clients about if such a thing would occur again, so took the decision to just play it safe and remove Disqus. I will certainly reconsider Disqus again in future hearing these words from you however. Cheers.

Edit: oh and nice website redesign by the way!

As some close watchers of Disqus may already know, Disqus is now a fully free service. For everybody, for any site, of any size.

This is the bigger news. But which features from the paid were now made available to the free users? Analytics/SSO?

As an aside, Facebook, Google, and LiveFyre really, really dropped the ball with their own commenting systems. Disqus really takes the crown.

If they're offering it for free now, how are they making money to support their massive infrastructure? Are they selling personal information?

From the blog post: Disqus’ business now centers around new advertising built on top of content discovery. It’s the way we bring more traffic to sites using Disqus and how we’re also helping them make money from their communities.

http://blog.disqus.com/post/56451685463/our-new-site-same-st...

Wow, yeah, according to this SSO is free now:

http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/236206-integ...

... that's huge news, when did that even happen?!

Such a pity they discontinued Ranks, that was one premium feature that I had hoped would eventually filter down to free users and really put a rocket under website communities.

I agree, the alternative commenting systems are surprisingly bad, especially when you consider that Disqus is right there, showing them how this whole commenting thing should be done. They should be Samsung to Disqus' Apple, but, instead, they're all Nokias with cracked screens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com