> 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.