Well, seing how disqus is YC-funded and intensedebate is techstars-funded (a competing seed fund), you'll probably find HN's sentiment toward the former.
While we may be biased, I've never noticed any sites I visit using IntenseDebate. Perhaps it's less branded than Disqus and I just don't recognize it? Or maybe the circles I run in just tend to favor Disqus?
I don't know about how much of a bias HN has. A lot of people are openly critical of HN products when they honestly don't like them: I'm often critical of Reddit, for instance, which was one of the first big things here. And in many cases, I don't know what companies are YCombinator and which aren't. Meanwhile, a lot of services that do get a lot of praise here aren't actually part of the incubator program.
In this case, Disqus is simply more used. I've never seen IntenseDebate outside of its web site, though I prefer its aesthetic look a bit more. I don't like the colloquial "Easy Tiger" message when you're not logged in, though, so it balances out.
The thing about Disqus that bugs me is its branding. It puts its name on every page thrice and its url twice. Because registration is so front-and-center on its comment form, I feel disinclined to use it to post. Furthermore, despite claims that it can be really well integrated, every time I see it it stands out - not really terribly, but I hate being able to instantly differentiate it from other comment systems.
Also, something about the up-and-down buttons piss me off. They look too grubby. And since they look the same on every blog, that quickly gets annoying.
You can remove the branding with CSS rather easily. I've looked for any guidelines on that in their TOS, but I don't see any. I removed the big Disqus logo on from my comments page, but people can still see that it's Disqus.
Their guidelines for use don't seem to mention whether they're OK with people removing their logo; they just say that you can customize it with CSS. Whether that's ethical I guess could be an entirely different debate... that being said, if they explicitly mentioned that you cannot remove branding, I'd put it back.
As far as I can recall, you can change just about anything. If CSS can't do it, you can always fallback to a little javascript, but it's pretty simple to customize.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 61.1 ms ] threadIn this case, Disqus is simply more used. I've never seen IntenseDebate outside of its web site, though I prefer its aesthetic look a bit more. I don't like the colloquial "Easy Tiger" message when you're not logged in, though, so it balances out.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/disqus.com+intensedebate.co...
Not that I'm putting much weight on these outside measurements. Just sayin'.
What's been every else's experiences? We're contemplating doing the same...
That said, I've also seen a number of comments get through recently that are essentially spam, which has been a bit of a pain.
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7635
Also, something about the up-and-down buttons piss me off. They look too grubby. And since they look the same on every blog, that quickly gets annoying.
Their guidelines for use don't seem to mention whether they're OK with people removing their logo; they just say that you can customize it with CSS. Whether that's ethical I guess could be an entirely different debate... that being said, if they explicitly mentioned that you cannot remove branding, I'd put it back.