I'm pretty sure I did not have ads until today either, it stands out quite clearly. Maybe it only happens on 'high traffic' days or some other criterion but this definitely blind sided me.
Not sure if this is the same thing the OP is talking about, but there is a 'Recommended Content' section with a bunch of ad-type links at the bottom of each post's comments on http://avc.com
The old comments aren’t completely lost. If jacquesm wanted to, he could export the comments to XML (http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472149-comme...) and then write a custom script to re-import them into a new commenting system of his choice. But unless he does that, then yes, the old comments are basically lost.
I think this should be highlighted: disqus is, at least, until now, quite upfront about telling you that the data is yours and you can take it away, if you don't want to use them anymore.
To me it depends. Something like Disquis where they were giving it away for free I agree. However if it is a for-pay service where you are exchanging money for service, they have some incentive to do right by you, so that your money does not go elsewhere.
Good point, but keep in mind that if they're a business, then the ultimate goal is to make money. It's kind of like the formula prescribed in Fight Club which refers to whether or not a car manufacturer will issue a recall: the decision will most often be based on which result will net greatest economic yield. If the profits from doing X are more than the expected losses (say, due to customer attrition), then that's a good "business decision".
That's the risk with any SaaS/PaaS/etc, not just ones going onto your site. Anytime you pay someone a monthly fee to offer you a service, there is a risk they will change things and force you to reconsider using that service, which will then lead to having to change whatever you doing to warrant said service.
Guess it boils down to trust and if you don't, buy something you keep locally and control.
So this has been going on earlier than December, at least as early as October, according to this Disqus blog post (which says they started it in August):
So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.
As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.
Right, until they change things again and you get a new 'feature' for your benefit which you auto opt-in to.
That's the kind of behavior that turned me off from having a facebook account. That you need to review their terms of service all the time to see what they are up to now.
"If you aren't paying for the product/service then you are the product/service being sold."
EDIT: Wow. Why the downvotes?
Do people still not understand this saying? I understand it hurts if/when you get burned but it shouldn't come as a surprise when free services change to something less desirable to monetize their business models. I wouldn't be surprised if they soon offer paid "premium" accounts that don't show ads.
No, you're thinking of contrapositive. Converses are not equivalent. In this case, contrapositive would be "if you're not the product, then you are paying for it."
"I think the ‘you are not the user, you are the product’ meme should die. It does a dis-service to the complexity of the situation and it masks some much more serious issues with online monetization models, and online privacy in general."
Of course you are right, and that is exactly why I was wrong not to see it coming. How often does one have to admit being wrong about something? Apparently it is wrong to trust any service that embeds itself on your webpage over the longer term, lesson learned. 3rd party javascript is now on my list of 'things to avoid', now I have to wonder whether I want those social media bits & pieces on there and what could be the impact of leaving them there.
I'd be very surprised if a twitter button suddenly turned into an advertisement but apparently that would be business as usual.
@jacquesm, in the case of a twitter button, or FB like button, those can usually be removed without significant impact to the overall user experience. A Disqus commenting engine is not as easily removed/replaced, especially given the potential loss of previously generated content. I guess it comes down whether the third party service is a core feature of your site/product.
I didn't post it to taunt you, I posted it as a response to the GP. I think that your point about the meme still stands fine, regardless of having to throw out some services that misuse your trust.
That said, I think you're overreacting. Fair enough that you feel screwed by Discus, but making the leap that you can never have any third party javascript because they might screw you in the future is a bit much, I think. At some point you'll have to trust someone.
I think it's a wholly useful meme. And I think the intention is not for it to educate those of us who understand the complexities of this business; rather, those who don't understand how companies can squeeze non-monetary value from users in exchange for a "free" service.
Apart from the other aswers, you may be happy to be the product on an iteration and not on another, and you are free to get angry when people claim they live to make you happy and later you discover that there is a postscript (unless we need to suck).
Why would you ever believe a company that says it exists to make you happy? Companies exist to make money, that is literally true. There is no other purpose. It just so happens that making people happy is often a reasonable way to make money, but if making people happy doesn't maximize profits, then eventually something else must be done.
Oh, no, I would never believe that but then again they are as free to lie and/or make changes in their service as I am to leave them when I please and get angry at their shamefacedness.
For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.
Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.
You can also not be the product as a free user (like on Weebly). The above quote implies that as a free user, you are always the product, and that's just not true.
Honest question, how is a free user not sold by Weebly?
It appears they have a for pay designer platform. It also appears they are funded... are they done raising rounds and/or not considering going public? The reason I ask, is because every free user is being sold then. Their usage/stat of adoption is being sold to investors and others in order to increase their value/price. I imagine someday, Weebly will find a way to place ads/marketing material in front of those free users (even if its just in periodic emails to those users).
EDIT: I could be wrong about them eventually placing ads in front of the users... but I imagine it and expect it to happen someday. If not, cheers!
I started Weebly. I plan to never place ads in front of free users.
As a company we are profitable and have been for over 4 years. We do plan on going public some day. But I find it a bit of a stretch to say that as a free user we are "selling you" as adoption statistics. As a free user, you are getting a lot of value, you pay nothing in return and you have no negative side-effects either (advertising, data gathering, etc)
The reality for us is that free users tend to be really happy with the service we are providing them for free. And they tend tell their friends about us. And some of their friends eventually pay us money for our Pro service (~$3-7/month).
Does that mean you are being sold? Absolutely not. You don't have to tell a friend. As a matter of fact, you don't have to do anything nice for us at all, and we'll still provide something of value to you for free.
But if you are pleasantly surprised at how easy it was, and you end up telling a friend on your own, that's great! And it justifies the cost of the free users of our service from a business point of view.
I suspect people are downvoting you because they understand the saying perfectly, it's just so overused these days that it's to the point of cliche. I don't think anyone doesn't know this, the more interesting conversation is when we talk about what that means to us and what we do about it.
They've been doing this for months, and it's done revenue-sharing style, so if you're getting a lot of comments, you stand a chance of making a couple of bucks through the ads. (If you go to your admin page and click Analytics, you'll see the discovery tab which tells you how much you've made.)
I've gotten multiple emails on it, so it certainly wasn't a bait and switch. A piece from November on the matter:
--
The new Promoted Discovery for Disqus was a major release for publishers like you who are seeking ways to drive business around content, community and conversation. We’re very excited about the results so far. There’s strong engagement in discovered content and excellent flow of new high quality traffic for websites using Disqus. This tells us it’s winning for both publishers and their readers.
We’re only getting started. As we grow, we'll continue to evaluate new opportunities for you to grow and make money with us. We think you’ll like them because, like Promoted Discovery, they will be complementary to the user experience. If you’d rather not try out these features, you can always turn them off in your settings.
The next feature we’re piloting lets you get credit for the traffic you drive to ecommerce sites like Amazon or eBay. If you already do some form of affiliate linking, we do nothing to those existing links. Soon, you may begin to see the impact of these in your reporting dashboard (we’ll be rolling this out slowly over time). Of course, all of this happens seamlessly behind the scenes — the experience for your readers doesn’t change at all. You can learn more by reading this page.
At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback.
I have not received an email, there is no opt-out switch, and honestly I have not seen this on the comment section of my blog until it showed up just now. Elsewhere in this thread there are people that say they don't have it right now so it appears to switch on/off according to some hidden criterion.
Highly annoying.
"At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible."
I hate language like that.
And I'm 100% sure that I have never seen these ads before.
It's a free service and they're at the point where monetization is becoming a necessity. I can appreciate that, and it's not a particularly evil way of doing it, if you ask me.
I don't know about you, but I can live with a couple of non-obtrusive links that go other places—especially since, like a lot of people, I got emails about it ahead of time. If you can't, you can turn it off.
You act as if the ads are putting ugly pictures of fat people are flooding your site or ads for e-Cigarettes or other skeevy things. I've been seeing them for months — their ads, far as I can tell, are of higher quality than the ones you see on Facebook and Google search. (I see links for Exxon, Comedy Central and Citi on a recent comment thread on my site. Certainly not bottom-shelf names.)
The reason why you probably didn't notice them is because they're so unobtrusive that they were designed so you wouldn't notice them. Now whatever philosophical issues that raises, I think, from what I've seen in my own experience, Disqus handled this the right way.
EDIT: I don't get the downvotes. My point is totally valid here.
No one begrudges a company trying to monetize, but there's an expectation that there will be some communication beforehand.
I'm sure if they sent multiple emails and if OP discovered the matter through official communications and not by looking at the page, then he may have been OK with it but more importantly wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch was pulled.
> It's a free service and they're at the point where monetization is becoming a necessity.
Monetization is not an optional thing that you tack on afterwards, unless you are willing to re-negotiate your relationships. If you do that on an auto-opt-in basis you are breaching the trust with your users.
> I don't know about you, but I can live with a couple of non-obtrusive links that go other places—especially since, like a lot of people, I got emails about it ahead of time. If you can't, you can turn it off.
Sure and if it had not been 'opt-in' and if I had actually received their messages I would have exported my comments and called it a day. But defaulting it to 'on' is not opt-in, that's forcing me in with the option to opt-out afterwards. And I absolutely do not want advertising on my website unless I know exactly who benefits from it and what the arrangement is. I ran a google tag for a while to help someone out, other than that my blog has always been ad free. Now I find I'm endorsing products and services that I would never endorse in a lifetime.
> You act as if the ads are putting ugly pictures of fat people are flooding your site or ads for e-Cigarettes or other skeevy things.
No, I'm acting this way because (1) there are ads at all and (2) especially exxon is very high on my shit-list for bad companies. Just about between Monsanto and McDonalds. Whether a company is bottom shelf or not has nothing to do with whether or not I want their advertising on my site. What's the point of having a comment moderation system to keep out unwanted links to advertisers if they sneak in the back door anyway?
> The reason why you probably didn't notice them is because they're so unobtrusive that they were designed so you wouldn't notice them.
Apparently that's only one part of the story, I don't know what the conditions are that make them switch on and off.
> Now whatever philosophical issues that raises, I think, from what I've seen in my own experience, Disqus handled this the right way.
Strong disagree, they could have simply left the feature to be switched off for existing accounts and switch it to default to 'on' for new accounts.
Accounts should be left in the state of the terms-of-service at the time of sign-up, any changes to a users setting that materially alter the relationship between service and user should be avoided at all cost because they breach trust.
Just out of curiosity, but what exactly did you think the arrangement between you and Disqus was? Their service obviously saves bloggers a lot of hassle, and it can't be free to maintain?
I don't mean to say that this justifies this perceived wrong, but it certainly justifies, from their standpoint, to think: "If you're going to use our service, for free, you should at least read our emails (and not filter them to the Spam folder)". Also on their side: they've allowed the ability to opt out.
So you can still drop the service on the grounds of principle, and technically, this is a "bait and switch"...but it's a pretty mild one.
Whatever it was that I thought I signed up for, I explicitly did not sign up for an advertising tag, especially not a stealthy one, and on top of that not one that looks like an active endorsement on my part.
That doesn't make any sense. You agreed to their terms of service and now you're complaining because it doesn't match your ideals. Disqus is a great service provided for free, what did you expect?
I did not expect to see myself recommending products and services that I would not ever think of recommending to others and I would not expect to see my site change from non-commercial to commercial and I did not expect to see ads masquerading as regular content.
Terms of service are a fig leaf, how you act is what matters and these actions are not acceptable, especially not for an opt-out that wasn't there when I signed up.
In what way are they not acceptable? They are totally acceptable to me. They provide a great service for free and now they want to monetize it with ads, shocking! I think it's extremely generous and quite remarkable of them to offer both a cut and an option to opt-out. They should be rewarded for that, not blamed. I think the sense of entitlement you have knowing that disqus offered you a great and free service for years and now a way to opt-out or even make money is really disgraceful.
They are not stealth ads as they warned their users a long time ago. I learned about that a few months ago already. You can't blame them for your inability to read your email correctly. Second, you had pretty strong words against disqus calling their decision "bullshit" and encouraging some sort of boycott. All because a free service decided to start making money in order to survive by proposing optional ads with a cut for you to make money on their free service. Sorry, but the sense of entitlement is really too strong here to let go. Had to point it out.
Stealth on the part of misrepresenting their origin as endorsed by the site owner, not stealth as in hidden from the site owner (an understandable mistake, given that both are at issue here).
I am not a disqus user, therefore I have no idea 'recommended content' is their term for paid adverts. I sometimes read jacquesm's site, therefore I could reasonably mistake something[1] with that title to
be recommended by him. He dislikes that this should happen without his explicit opting-in to such a system.
He's allowed to be pissed. Is principle so rare to you that you're mistaking it for entitlement?
If I offer to paint your house for free, and I do a good job of it but also steal your TV, you actually are entitled to be upset and even call the cops. You can't say, "Hey, I was working for free, and now I want to monetize it with his TV. He's acting so entitled, like I need to ask if it's OK first."
(Obviously I'm not saying they stole anyone's TV, but more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones. The principle of "It's free, so I can do whatever I want and you're being an entitled brat if you object" is simply fallacious.)
Long story short: Working for free does not give you free reign to violate people's trust. Something that isn't OK doesn't suddenly become OK just because you were working for free. If you acted under-handedly, don't be surprised when they call you under-handed on their blog. Being free doesn't immunize you from accusations of under-handedness. It does limit their recourse, but they still have every right to be unhappy.
That's a poor analogy and even you have pointed it out. So using it only creates an unnecessary and invalid connection between stealing and what disqus did.
To be fair, "I can do whatever I want" was actually the condition GP pointed out. As other users have pointed out, this was not a surprise to most of them as they were notified about it.
> they still have every right to be unhappy
Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party malicious.
> That's a poor analogy and even you have pointed it out.
No, I pointed out why it's a perfectly fine analogy ("more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones").
When drawing an analogy, the things need only be similar in the areas being compared. In fact, the more dissimilar they are in other respects, the better, because the whole point of an analogy is to show how similar features behave in different contexts.
For example, if you put forward the proposition, "OJ Simpson is violent because he is black," I might respond by pointing to other well-known black men such as Martin Luther King, who was clearly not violent and is pretty well known as a good person. This does not mean I'm equating OJ Simpson and Martin Luther King in any respect other than their race — in fact, the differences between the men are at the heart of the comparison. They are similar in the aspect being compared (race), but otherwise unlike each other in nearly every way possible.
If any dissimilarity invalidated an analogy in the way you seem to believe, analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be compared to themselves.
> So using it only creates an unnecessary and invalid connection between stealing and what disqus did.
No, it doesn't! I posted a fairly long parenthetical specifically explaining this. Please take the time to read and think about what you've read before replying in the future. It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over.
Again, the difference between the two actions is at the heart of the analogy. Obviously you'll agree that the painter who steals the TV is in the wrong. Nobody thinks it's OK to steal your customer's stuff. The point is that the same justification — he offered a free service, so he is entitled to monetize it in ways that affect you without telling you and you have no right to complain — would appear to apply to the painter's actions. Thus, it is a weak justification. That was my point.
> Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party malicious.
ctrl-F malic -> 0 results
Uh, cool?
I don't think anybody is calling Disqus malicious. Malice is intent to injure someone, and there's no evidence that Disqus was actively seeking to hurt people. I think the accusation here is that the way Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky.
You are calling out for slippery slope, if X is acceptable than 1000X must also be. And since 1000X is not, therefore X shouldn't be.
> analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be compared to themselves.
To be honest, I rarely trust analogies as logical statements. They are good for introduction to a concept but they have an inherent bias towards the view of the constructor which may not be visible to the other side in an debate.
The argument you put forward was that 'I do it for free so I can do anything' is fallacious. Yes, it is. Firstly the argument here is 'You agree that I do this for free, the definition of 'this' may change with time and it is entirely my right to do so' is the actual condition.
> It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over
I am sorry I annoyed you, that was not my intent. I did read it but may be I can't read as well as I hoped I did.
> ctrl-F malic -> 0 results. Uh, cool?
While I am at least a little offended by the snark I would assume that it was my mistake that I annoyed you a lot. English is not really my first language so probably my choice of word 'malicious' was out of place, but you are taking things too literally. Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky - I am trying to point out that they notified their users and were not trying to hide anything about this.
Honestly, I see no point continuing to annoy you. So I will shut up.
Blockbuster, Zappos, and AOL have all been burned by having language in their ToSes to that effect. It's a bad idea if you want any legal cover from your TOS. IANAL, but this guy is and he says
STOP PUTTING CLAUSES INTO YOUR CONTRACTS THAT SAY YOU CAN AMEND THE
CONTRACT AT ANY TIME IN YOUR SOLE DISCRETION BY POSTING THE REVISED
TERMS TO THE WEBSITE
The OP was very clear, just in case some missed the point:
OP does not like ad's and is unhappy with bait and switch. This is clear bait and switch, no denying that. As for the companies business and how they need to make money - that is another subject for another thread.
I hadn't seen the TOS back whenever he registered, but I would be quite surprised if the TOS didn't give the service the right to choose the content it would deliver to those who use its service. In fact, if it didn't, they should fire whoever is running their legal department.
Perhaps you're confused to the purpose of a TOS. It is not a business plan where the company outlines their feature roadmap.
> Just out of curiosity, but what exactly did you think the arrangement between you and Disqus was?
Obviously he thought, and was correct about thinking, that it didn't include ads.
All the ex-post-facto justifications for the change boil down to something like "But didn't you realize that as an entity in a capitalistic society, the opposing party in your deal is always going to be seeking more revenue?" which is always true of every deal, can be used to justify any change whatsoever, and thus is a rather thin justification.
I think you are taking it far too hard. If you don't like it, turn it off or switch. Ads showing up in your comments page is hardly the end of the world. Lighten up.
While I don't know what happened with your sites, I just activated the "new" Disqus on my two sites. There are four settings you can choose for this:
(1) Comments only
(2) Comments and links only on your site
(3) Comments, links on your site and 'recommended' links
(4) Same as (3) but links may be above comment box
The default setting appears to be (2); I tried this under two different Disqus accounts with three web sites, and that was the setting "Discovery" came up with each time. This doesn't strike me as particularly outrageous -- the links they are inserting are only links to your own articles, not advertising (and not revenue-generating, of course).
Whether you warned users of this change or not, to me, that isn't the problem. The issue is that they are stealth ads.
As jacques mentioned, and the screenshot shows, the ads look like they are personal recommendations by jacques, and this is what is quite sneaky/crappy about this whole change.
If you went the route of using other language like sponsored ads, I think you were in the right, it's your service and you can change it, but this is indeed quite sneaky. It's like me going on tv and saying Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan recommend my app. It's a lie.
If new features in any product/service aren't defaulted to 'on', no one will ever use any of them. Normal people don't change settings. As long as you're notified of the change (which Disqus did through email and blog posts) and it's not a privacy concern, I think 99% of companies will and should do exactly what they did in this situation.
Whether it's comments, posts, email, OS, government etc... what you don't control, you don't own. Period.
I enjoy reading comments (despite their negative vibe lately) since there are still some nuggets of gold amid the asinine BS. The deluge of rubbish is really from unmoderated places (news blogs are particularly notorious), but if an admin keeps on top of these, comments are a beautiful thing. Another blog losing comments is a damn shame. It's just one more nail in the coffin for interraction away from the shadow of walled gardens.
I think this was already mentioned elsewhere on HN, but Stallman was right.
Regardless, it should be opt-in rather than a backstab to the user's trust. Actions speak louder than words, and this behaviour says plentiful of this company's management.
Disqus is in the unenviable position of having a freemium product that everyone wants but nobody is willing to pay for. Their freemium model provides commenting services with the expectation that value-added features or the need for an SLA would compel site owners to upgrade to paid plans in order to use those features. Problem is, customers that are large and important enough to require an SLA are also large and important enough to be able to afford a custom solution.
This leaves them with the options of transitioning the business model to something that people are willing to pay for, or finding ways to extract value from their free customers.
I know of one other commenting widget provider who got into this exact same morass, but they have opted to leverage the communities that their customers have created to engage in "influencer marketing", where the site owner cooperates with the commenting widget provider to have an above-board "sponsored conversation" with a third party company.
Since it's unlikely that Disqus will be able to successfully integrate advertisements into commenting feeds in a way that doesn't damage their relationships with site owners, an approach like this shifts the value-extraction machinery away from a site's commenters, who Disqus technically has no claim on, and provides an avenue for mutual profit with the site owners, who have an existing relationship with Disqus.
I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.
The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.
Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".
I have to disagree even as someone relying on Disqus in a few different ways.
First off, they did provide notice. I received an email about this at all the addresses I have an account under. Maybe the the author didn't and that sucks but this seems like an edge case and he is one of the exceptions, not the rule.
Second, you can turn this feature off which brings me to my next point. Even if they do decide to change this can you really blame them? The thing is we're all using the service for free and on top of it they're willing to share revenue with users. I mean we can't just expect every free service to never monetize. Could they have done it differently? Sure but lets not give in to the temptation to be armchair CEOs here and proclaim that we know that a different model would have worked better for everyone. I give Disqus the benefit of the doubt that they did their homework and decided that this is the best way for them to monetize and still do right by their users.
I use Disqus on my personal blog and I use it as part of an app I'm quite passionate about. In my app (link is in my profile) I use Disqus in much the same way Tumblr does where you enter your short name and your public pages can have comments. As someone using them in these two different ways I empathize with the author especially when it comes to my app as I don't want the ads associated with anything I'm personally doing but at the same time I'm not blaming Disqus either. I use them, in both cases, as an alternative to rolling my own. Their platform is far richer than anything I could do so even if they didn't allow opting out its still a win for me.
In the end this outrage is unnecessary. Disqus made no secret of this, reached out to us, provided a way to opt out, and even offered to share revenue! On top of that they're still a totally free service that's offering us value. The author himself says his blog will no longer have comments because of this. Why? I'm sure he can create a commenting system himself but obviously Disqus is delivering value in a way that's pretty tough to replace.
Come on guys, its one thing to not like these ads but to not use Disqus in protest really isn't hurting Disqus as much as it is the person who stops using them in most cases. They definitely acted in good faith on this one and we need to stop acting like every free service on the web owes us the service we want, how we want it, when we want it. This isn't a charity we're talking about here, its a web startup. I follow jaquesm's blog and I agree with most of his thoughts but I can't get behind this one.
How would you feel if twitter decided to include (for your benefit, of course) a bunch of advertising next to their button after sending you an email about it and defaulting to 'on'. Would that be ok for you or would you feel that that was not what you signed up for when you decided to embed their button tag?
I signed up for a 'comment tag', not for an 'advertising tag'. There is a world of a difference between those two, it changes my blog from a non-commercial one into a commercial one and that is - to me at least - a major shift. On top of that they make it look as if I endorse these links.
To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.
you can stop using their service if you dont like it.
I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.
And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.
> To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.
then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.
> you can stop using their service if you dont like it.
I just did.
> I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.
This free service just made it look as if I endorse a bunch of companies and decided to change my site from non-commercial to commercial. That's my prerogative.
> And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.
They may have warned, I definitely did not receive it, they changed the terms of service post the part where I signed up and defaulted me to behaviour under the new terms of service. That is 'bait-and-switch'.
> then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.
Actually, their terms of service bind me and them, sure they can change the terms but those are not the terms that I agreed to when I signed up and I don't go around checking the terms of service every 3 days to see if someone is up to something sneaky.
You agree that Disqus may include advertisements and/or content provided by Disqus and/or a third party (collectively “Ads”) as part of the implementation of the Service.
Now I don't know if this language was there before the change you are speaking of, but if it wasn't I'm sure included in their TOS was that you agree to them being able to amend their TOS at any time to include something like this.
Let's just say that I find an opt-out change of a comment engine to an advertising tag that states that I recommend certain products and services using stealthy advertising a non negotiable move, no matter what your terms of service say.
You seem to be focused on what Disqus has the right to do, while jacquesm is talking about user expectations and the consequences of violating them.
I'm inclined to agree with him that displaying ads on the user's site without explicit opt-in is a major faux pas with the potential to destroy a company's reputation permanently.
Hi Jacques, completely support. I see a handle of people trying to destabilize you and you defend your position so well that I didn't find anything to add, except that I fully support your point, and I am sure many more do.
This should be called disqusgate and I'd really expect to hear Fred Wilson on it, if not done yet.
"you can stop using their service if you dont like it."
That's exactly what they said they were doing: Did you actually read the post?
They discovered a shady, poorly communicated "feature" had been enabled, so they dropped the service.
As ryguytilidie says below, it is bizarre that behaviours like this are defended, and it needs to become less acceptable of a business life-cycle strategy. I'll point a bit of the finger at the host himself, PG, as he has oft stated that you don't need to concern yourself with revenue, but rather eyeballs. That is inevitably a bait and switch -- get them in on a clean, simple commenting system, sneak ads in (with hilariously misleading emails that they know no one will actually read) later on.
>did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you //
I disagree with this. There is a moral obligation on both parties regardless of the presence of a consideration (payment of money) in the contract.
There is a binding contract, albeit most likely not legally enforceable and of uncertain terms. To consider an extreme, what if disqus has said they were going to include porn links in their plugin area. Some might well consider covert advertising as more insidious than inappropriate porn.
If we're in a bar and you need to use the WC, I offer to watch your stuff but instead I just walk off as soon as you leave the room. Well, "no binding contract" but I've still acted immorally and anti-socially.
Offering someone something free-gratis doesn't give you carte blanche to screw them over as soon as their figurative back is turned.
tl;dr I offer you a free beer, ha-ha I pissed in it, "what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ?"
In fact, I'd almost prefer a comment service start serving up porn on my blog. At least it should, presumably, be fairly clear that it's spam, and not something I've actually endorsed. This "recommendations" feature is essentially Disqus abusing the fact that they can generate content on my site to do one better than the comment spammers they protect us from, and make it look like I'm endorsing their random links. Spammers' wet dream, really (the fact that they're links to well-known publications and not virus-laden sites notwithstanding).
There are many other ways for a free service to make changes like this. Grandfathering existing users, to name one example which probably would have made jacques a lot happier.
True, but I think the bigger point is: why do you believe you have any right to demand anything? The service is free, you should be expected that the service you are not paying a dime for may do things you don't quite like once in a while.
I think the bigger issue here is the entitlement that seems to come with every service online now days. People seem to think they are entitled to demand whatever they like and how they like it for things they aren't even paying someone for. I think the best example of this was all of the whining about Craigslist suing Padmapper because it was ripping off Craigslist content and trying to piggyback off of the work CL has put into building their brand and infrastructure.
My point is that there seems to be an entitlement to be outraged over free services you don't pay for now days, and that people seem to think they need to write blog posts to publicly shame companies when they alter services they are offering to the public for exactly zero dollars.
That comparison is ridiculous. It's a free service, either click two buttons to revert it to the previous state without ads, or delete your account. Move on with your life and stop the entitled whining.
For the record, I think the CL haters are a bunch of whiners, too. I draw a line between users demanding a site change to accommodate their whims and users expecting a site to not change.
Stasis is good. Let some other site be the one to "innovate".
>True, but I think the bigger point is: why do you believe you have any right to demand anything? The service is free, you should be expected that the service you are not paying a dime for may do things you don't quite like once in a while.
I think it is more of a feeling of breaking a "gentlemen's agreement". When a free service provides a service for X amount of time (expectation building), and you provide them with lots of data and additional users (network effect), and then suddenly they change the rules, it is upsetting. Being a victim of bait-and-switch is not a pleasant feeling.
If the CEO of a free service I was using came onto my property and started smashing my windows, I'd certainly feel I have the right to demand he stop (even if his actions were endorsed by the service).
By all means, they have the right to shut down their service, or change their policies, etc. But I think their underhanded way of implying the service-user endorses something which they don't is ethically wrong whether there is an existing business relationship or not.
In summary, I feel there is a set of things I absolutely have the right to demand of free services. There is a different set of things which I would prefer they not do, but are completely within their rights (shutting down the service, charging for it, changing the way their comment model works, anything like that).
Like I said, I can totally empathize. No, it's not cool to do that without any notice or consent. You didn't get the notice so as far as you're concerned there was none. I get that, it's totally understandable.
That said, I don't think your example of Twitter is a good one. They're too different for that to work. But I don't think getting into that would be very productive for anyone so rather than doing that I'll just say this: while I get where you're coming from I think you're expectations are just north of being totally reasonable. The core if it makes total sense but it starts to unravel when you consider your expectation that you want to " trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service". That right there, the way I read it, means either "I expect your company to provide the exact same service and follow the exact same policies that I signed up with forever" or "you can only change your service and/or policies when it benefits me". That's unreasonable. No company on earth keeps its policies and services the same forever. They change every now and then. It upsets people and sometimes a change is negative for us but we adjust and move on.
I get why you're leaving but still don't think Disqus is in the wrong. They obviously need to change their service to continue to provide the service. For some, like you, that's not acceptable but its still not that big of a deal. One thing I think you're forgetting is that there's a huge gap here between what you experienced and what the reality is.
What you experienced what a major change in service without your consent or knowledge of it at all. That's certainly a reason to be upset.
But the reality of the situation is that your case is an exception. Disqus did provide warning and a way to opt out. Now, had you not missed the announcement about this would you still feel the same way today?
To be clear, I'm not telling you you're wrong to feel this way. What I'm saying is that it's wrong to characterize Disqus' actions as being sneaky or in breach of trust because they did provide a warning and a way to opt out - you, unfortunately, just happened to not get the memo. That sucks.
(1) I don't expect them to deliver a certain service 'forever', they can shut down if they want to, I understand that
(2) they can change their policies but they can't (or at least, should not, it is painfully obvious that they can) make it opt-out if it is a major change (and to me, adding stealthy advertising is a major change)
(3) they can't use my name to make it seem as if I am on board with something when in fact I am totally not on board with that
(4) I'm fine with them acting in this way, but then they have to accept that I'll call them out on it
(5) web services (especially embeds) should default to grandfathering in older users
(6) This change does not appear to me to be in line with accepted practice and legal requirements for advertising, as such they are making me part of something I do not wish to be a part of, stealth advertising is something I am very much against.
(7) Had I received the announcement and had I seen that it was 'opt-out' I would have killed my disqus account immediately. Opt-out is the wrong way to make changes like these. To have no positive confirmation for a change like this is not acceptable to me.
(8) I feel they are sneaky because of the way the ad blends in, because apparently when I'm on my home machine those ads are not there (or at least, they were not until yesterday) and I feel that such changes should never be forced.
(1) I don't expect them to deliver a certain service 'forever', they can shut down if they want to, I understand that
Um, I was really expecting to read: "...they can start charging me if they want to." And then your Twitter comparison too makes me think you really expect a free service, but one that cost money to operate, not to attempt to have an actual business model at some point in the future. Why would they just shut down before trying to make money?
Number 3 is especially important I think. It's especially sneaky to make it look like you're endorsing something you aren't or, worse, never even heard of.
As for number 6 I'm no lawyer nor do I even have enough casual knowledge of this sort of thing to know anything about it so I'll take your word for it and if that really is the case then I'd wonder why they're not in any trouble over it yet.
Where we differ here is on what we believe we're entitled to and when I use the word 'entitled' I'm not saying it in the usual "oh too many people think they're entitled to XYZ with free services these days" sense. Maybe "expectations" would be a better word but that's not it either. Yes, I do believe too many people feel too entitled these days especially with free services like this but that belief isn't absolute and I do believe there are some things we as users of any service free or not are entitled to, almost like a web user's bill of rights. Those things, in my mind are:
1. Notice of changes to service and policies
If a policy is going to change or a feature is going to be added, removed, or modified we should get some sort of notice via email, blog post or preferably both.
2. The right of free users to keep their active accounts for as long as the service stays in business
If I have a free Google account I expect that so long as I'm using it reasonably often Google won't decide one day to just get rid of all free accounts.
3. The right to continue using the core offering regardless of feature additions, subtractions, or modifications for any other account type.
So as an Instagram user I should be able to take, post, like, and comment on photos as that is the very core of the product. If one day Instagram has paid accounts I'm not entitled to any of the upgraded features but I should never lose the ability to use the service in its most basic ways because I'm using it free.
Those are the three "rights" I think we should have and even then they're still more like requests because we're still at the mercy of the provider until we pay. But generally, a free service provider who acts in good faith would follow those 3 rules. Now I think wanting the ads to be opt-in is more of a nice-to-have than something we should absolutely expect. I don't think its reasonable because users probably won't take notice at all as it requires effort. But by having it be opt-out, those who care will take the effort. It's really a win-win. Those who care don't have to deal with it while those who don't care get to share the revenue.
Your line was crossed and you left and no one can't respect that. I have different limits and think mine are a little more reasonable considering it's a free service.
I actually just registered the domain 'userbillofrights.org' because of your comment. Even though I don't agree with you here I think there's still a lot I do agree with and I want to invite you to help me write a user's bill of rights and maybe put it out there and get some free service providers to "endorse" it and maybe even try to compile a list of services that adhere to the user's bill of rights so people can see who they're dealing with before signing up. It's probably a dumb idea but I think it'd be fun. We can start with Disqus.
If they had announced "we're going to add links to your comments to make it seem you're endorsing advertising of our choosing" that would not have made it okay.
It's not something you can just announce and then do. There is no possible way it is okay to make "we're going to use your voice" as an opt-out feature. Without his consent it is just wrong. They could have sent him letters or even left him voicemail messages, but anything short of getting explicit approval makes the appearance of his endorsement a misrepresentation, or more simply, a lie.
Ads is one thing, Links titled "Recommended content" something completely different. As the OP writes, the way Disqus presents its Ads make them seem like regular content endorsed by the site's editor. And THIS is the total no-go area Disqus just ventured into, without even taking the minimum precursions by defaulting to opt-in. Bye bye Disqus.
I can confirm they contact me as well. On 12/11/12, they sent me an email titled "Growing with Disqus". However,
1) Gmail auto-labeled it as "Promotions", so I didn't read it. Not disqus' fault, just saying.
2) The text is shady; never does it mention specifically that ads will be placed on your site, but dances around the issue before finally saying "if you'd rather not try this feature, you can always turn it off". I likely would not have understood that they were putting ads on my site even if I had given the email a quick read. The subject line sure doesn't help.
I don't mean that I'm outraged or surprised. Just confirming that I received the same email and examining it a bit.
I'm pretty sure smart labels is opt-in, so it's more fair to say that it's the result of a filtering feature the user turned on but does not explicitly control and cannot accurately predict.
Even if a spam filter would eat it: not receiving negative feedback is not the same as consent. So you can't just fire off an email and consider your duty done. If you want to use an email that way there should be some kind of confirmation link in there.
I think the main problem is this pervasive habit (not talking only about disqus here) of making controversial modifications (because hey, they must know that a significant part of their users won't like it) and making them the default. I don't think that the OP would have minded so much if the feature was turned off by default. It's like social networks changing their privacy options, and making everything public by default.. but with the option to revert to normal when/if you realize what changed.
As for the second point, the fact that the ad links are similar to all others: that really IS sneaky, however you look at it.
"The thing is we're all using the service for free and on top of it they're willing to share revenue with users. I mean we can't just expect every free service to never monetize. "
This is one of the problems with some, and mostly the ad based, modern startups, and it seems like most are taking the lead from Facebook here, but the problem is basically that companies create a product that provides value, as Disqus does. As they build it, they know if they do something like put in ads, you wont use it, so they don't put in ads. However, after they have a bunch of users, they realize they need to make money, and therefore change the product to provide less value and put ads in. I feel like a lot of what I see lately seems to imply that we "owe" these companies something(people seem to do the same thing with adblock). I feel no allegiance here, Disqus made a product that people would like, people started using it, and then they took some value away in a fairly shady way. Frankly I wish stuff like this was called out more often. The last thing it needs is defending.
That's not totally true. They don't just decide to start putting ads up because one day they woke up and thought "holy shit, we have a billion users! how are we going to support this? Quick! Pull out the ads!". It's more like they intend to monetize in the future no matter what but the only thing stopping them is adoption. They need users to adopt the service first before its even monetizeable. I'm sure if ads or whatever model was profitable from day 1 they'd be using it. It's not a matter of purposely deceiving users, it's a matter of at what point do the different models actually yield revenue. Once they get to that point you start seeing the monetization happen. It can be from day 1 or 5 years down the road but all startups need to make money.
Also, they didn't do anything shady here. If you're following you'll know that they both provided ample notice and offered to share the revenue and you can even opt out. I mean, what do we expect here? Are they supposed to have it be opt-in because that's how we like it and we can't be bothered to log in and tick the box to turn it off? We're not paying for anything here and on top of it we're going to tell them how to run the company like we own stock? This is a business, not an open source project or a charity.
If you intend to monetize, perhaps it might be best not to do it in a way that alienates or upsets your user base. That's the take away we should be looking at. Not that Ads are bad, not that monetization is bad, but:
If you want a service to grow and to be profitable you need to be aware of how your shift from growing the user base to monetizing the user base doesn't lose the user base.
That's ridiculous. Ads produce positive revenue from day 1. The cost of putting them in is negligible. We can't know why they waited until now, but "insufficient number of users" was not why they took 5 years to do it.
It's a shame that comments like this one repudiating several of the details in the original article can't be viewed at the location of the originating post.
Instead, everyone who reads the article in the future will have an one-sided impression of the situation (unless the author edits the post based on the points brought up in this thread) due to the lack of comments.
edit: ok link added at the bottom of the article. I hope that helps, I figured out belatedly that this may have been your way of making a joke but it is a useful addition so thank you for the hint.
You're ignoring the part where this is an utterly unethical way of advertising regardless of how it came about.
Them offering to share revenue makes it stink even worse. Even if it's 100% opt-in, they're basically trying to bribe their users into misleading their visitors.
Terms like "benefit of the doubt" and "good faith" don't apply to companies that do business like that.
>They definitely acted in good faith on this one //
So when they changed the service from comment hosting to adding covert advertising they sent an email with a title along the lines "disqus are adding adverts to our comment service" and made it clear the adverts would be masked as regular content? (Can someone post the email?)
Presumably, as they acted in good faith, they also noted to users which jurisdictions this would cause legal problems in? (masking paid adverts as regular content).
Also, there must be a cheque waiting for the OP now - you wouldn't put advertising in place without paying after all - would be interesting to know how much that is for and what the split is?
Surely in good faith you wouldn't modify your service [excellent as it was] so drastically without requiring an opt in?
I don't know why you keep calling this stealthy or a bait and switch, I've received emails on this. Also at one point, Disqus was showing me that I was not using the latest "theme/style" and that I should upgrade. And in doing so, it would enable features such as recommended and related content.
Everything I did last year fulfills the requirements of 'opt-in'. I could have left the old style and never received the new features.
Based on my experience with this exact feature, I think the OP mis-read/didn't read the information provided by Disqus.
@jacquesm I felt the same way and got mad at disqus when I saw they did that without my consent. I turned off the "feature" and started looking for alternatives.
Vanilla Forums looked like it provides a neat option to serve the same purpose (embedded comments hosted elsewhere)
I came here to say the same thing. It seems to have the same functionality except your users have to signup either on your site or through some oauth I believe.
I completely agree with Jacques that they should have been up front with him about the change, shortformblog suggests that they were with them, so perhaps the blog provider wasn't passing along the email? What ever, its annoying I'm sure to wake up and find you've gone commercial!
As a web site that gets quite a bit of traffic (blekko.com) It is interesting to see both sides of this conversation. As the 'ops' guy I'm always getting cold called/emailed from salespeople for services that will "drive traffic to your web site" and the business model is all very similar. Apparently it works well for these 'service providers.'
To illustrate, lets make up a company, we'll call it "megatraffic" or MT for short. They call me up and they say, "Chuck we can drive millions of page views your way, which you can monetize with this ad-provider network. We'll share revenue 50/50, how cool is that?"
Their other guy calls me up and says "Hey Chuck, we make your site visible to millions, for just a small price per click, we'll put a link to your site on the {hundreds/thousands/millions} of sites in our network."
So MT here sells both ends of the pie, they "become" a sort of ad network by charging folks who contribute links to the customer site. And then they also get 50% of the revenue when someone follows that link and then clicks on an ad at the landing page. That's a pretty sweet deal for them, kind of a lame deal for the patsy who is paying and paying. It is like affiliate marketing where you don't realize right away that you are an affiliate.
Then we read about (and I block from our search engine) on a daily basis organized groups of miscreants who then write code to click through these networks to shake loose the pennies and nickels and quarters that the revenue generates. Given Google's publicly reported ad revenue its easy to see how clever people can create multi-million dollar revenue streams with just a bit of programming, maybe a botnet or two, and a complicit traffic aggregator.
All that money just laying there. First you pick up a few pennies, then a couple of bucks, next thing you know you're working to squeeze every click you can off the page like HuffPo.
The preferred way in which I think plug-in services should work is that they leave older accounts in the state they were when they signed up under some set of terms-of-service and from the moment of changing the TOS can default new sign-ups to have the newer settings enabled.
I didn't notice this happening on my blog either until a friend notified me. When I looked at my blog post, the ad space was just filled with my own blog posts, so I thought it was cool, since users will be referred to other articles I wrote. However, for everyone else, those slots were ads and links to blog posts outside my blog. I disabled the feature right away. I have my own ways of making money without Disqus helping out incognito, thank you very much.
My problem is not that they have this feature, and I don't really care whether they sent out an email or not. My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when we look at our own pages. I chose disqus over facebook comments b/c I can see facebook pulling something like this, but it's definitely disappointing to see from disqus.
> My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when we look at our own pages.
If true that is a lot nastier than it seemed so far.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadedit: done, snapshot added to the post, you probably will have to do a shift-f5 to see the update.
They do not work for you, they do not answer to you, and their motives are usually quite different than yours.
Thus, don't be surprised when they act to satisfy those motives in ways that you may not entirely agree with.
Guess it boils down to trust and if you don't, buy something you keep locally and control.
Incidentally, I agree with you.
http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-d...
So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.
As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.
That's the kind of behavior that turned me off from having a facebook account. That you need to review their terms of service all the time to see what they are up to now.
EDIT: Wow. Why the downvotes?
Do people still not understand this saying? I understand it hurts if/when you get burned but it shouldn't come as a surprise when free services change to something less desirable to monetize their business models. I wouldn't be surprised if they soon offer paid "premium" accounts that don't show ads.
This quote has become a cliche and doesn't add that much to the conversation.
So one reason that it (maybe) doesn't add much is that everyone knows it is tue, but doesn't want to think about it.
"If you are the customer, then you are not the product."
This is false (many contradictory examples show that you can be both customer and product), and so the original quote itself is false.
http://imgur.com/532xPbd
Note that "If you're not the customer, you're the product" is true, but "If you are the customer, you're not the product" is false.
Your reasoning would hold if the categories were mutually exclusive, but, as you noted, they aren't.
It's a thought-terminating cliché.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/you-are-not-the-customer-you-are-...
Meta: I went googling for this article, know I'd read it, but not where. I found the coincidence of the author quite amusing.
Silly me, I guess I should have seen it coming.
I'd be very surprised if a twitter button suddenly turned into an advertisement but apparently that would be business as usual.
That said, I think you're overreacting. Fair enough that you feel screwed by Discus, but making the leap that you can never have any third party javascript because they might screw you in the future is a bit much, I think. At some point you'll have to trust someone.
For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.
Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.
It appears they have a for pay designer platform. It also appears they are funded... are they done raising rounds and/or not considering going public? The reason I ask, is because every free user is being sold then. Their usage/stat of adoption is being sold to investors and others in order to increase their value/price. I imagine someday, Weebly will find a way to place ads/marketing material in front of those free users (even if its just in periodic emails to those users).
EDIT: I could be wrong about them eventually placing ads in front of the users... but I imagine it and expect it to happen someday. If not, cheers!
As a company we are profitable and have been for over 4 years. We do plan on going public some day. But I find it a bit of a stretch to say that as a free user we are "selling you" as adoption statistics. As a free user, you are getting a lot of value, you pay nothing in return and you have no negative side-effects either (advertising, data gathering, etc)
The reality for us is that free users tend to be really happy with the service we are providing them for free. And they tend tell their friends about us. And some of their friends eventually pay us money for our Pro service (~$3-7/month).
Does that mean you are being sold? Absolutely not. You don't have to tell a friend. As a matter of fact, you don't have to do anything nice for us at all, and we'll still provide something of value to you for free.
But if you are pleasantly surprised at how easy it was, and you end up telling a friend on your own, that's great! And it justifies the cost of the free users of our service from a business point of view.
I don't know if these are ads free though.
I've gotten multiple emails on it, so it certainly wasn't a bait and switch. A piece from November on the matter:
--
The new Promoted Discovery for Disqus was a major release for publishers like you who are seeking ways to drive business around content, community and conversation. We’re very excited about the results so far. There’s strong engagement in discovered content and excellent flow of new high quality traffic for websites using Disqus. This tells us it’s winning for both publishers and their readers.
We’re only getting started. As we grow, we'll continue to evaluate new opportunities for you to grow and make money with us. We think you’ll like them because, like Promoted Discovery, they will be complementary to the user experience. If you’d rather not try out these features, you can always turn them off in your settings.
The next feature we’re piloting lets you get credit for the traffic you drive to ecommerce sites like Amazon or eBay. If you already do some form of affiliate linking, we do nothing to those existing links. Soon, you may begin to see the impact of these in your reporting dashboard (we’ll be rolling this out slowly over time). Of course, all of this happens seamlessly behind the scenes — the experience for your readers doesn’t change at all. You can learn more by reading this page.
At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback.
Highly annoying.
"At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible."
I hate language like that.
And I'm 100% sure that I have never seen these ads before.
http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/666278#disco...
I don't know about you, but I can live with a couple of non-obtrusive links that go other places—especially since, like a lot of people, I got emails about it ahead of time. If you can't, you can turn it off.
You act as if the ads are putting ugly pictures of fat people are flooding your site or ads for e-Cigarettes or other skeevy things. I've been seeing them for months — their ads, far as I can tell, are of higher quality than the ones you see on Facebook and Google search. (I see links for Exxon, Comedy Central and Citi on a recent comment thread on my site. Certainly not bottom-shelf names.)
The reason why you probably didn't notice them is because they're so unobtrusive that they were designed so you wouldn't notice them. Now whatever philosophical issues that raises, I think, from what I've seen in my own experience, Disqus handled this the right way.
EDIT: I don't get the downvotes. My point is totally valid here.
I'm sure if they sent multiple emails and if OP discovered the matter through official communications and not by looking at the page, then he may have been OK with it but more importantly wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch was pulled.
Monetization is not an optional thing that you tack on afterwards, unless you are willing to re-negotiate your relationships. If you do that on an auto-opt-in basis you are breaching the trust with your users.
> I don't know about you, but I can live with a couple of non-obtrusive links that go other places—especially since, like a lot of people, I got emails about it ahead of time. If you can't, you can turn it off.
Sure and if it had not been 'opt-in' and if I had actually received their messages I would have exported my comments and called it a day. But defaulting it to 'on' is not opt-in, that's forcing me in with the option to opt-out afterwards. And I absolutely do not want advertising on my website unless I know exactly who benefits from it and what the arrangement is. I ran a google tag for a while to help someone out, other than that my blog has always been ad free. Now I find I'm endorsing products and services that I would never endorse in a lifetime.
> You act as if the ads are putting ugly pictures of fat people are flooding your site or ads for e-Cigarettes or other skeevy things.
No, I'm acting this way because (1) there are ads at all and (2) especially exxon is very high on my shit-list for bad companies. Just about between Monsanto and McDonalds. Whether a company is bottom shelf or not has nothing to do with whether or not I want their advertising on my site. What's the point of having a comment moderation system to keep out unwanted links to advertisers if they sneak in the back door anyway?
> The reason why you probably didn't notice them is because they're so unobtrusive that they were designed so you wouldn't notice them.
Apparently that's only one part of the story, I don't know what the conditions are that make them switch on and off.
> Now whatever philosophical issues that raises, I think, from what I've seen in my own experience, Disqus handled this the right way.
Strong disagree, they could have simply left the feature to be switched off for existing accounts and switch it to default to 'on' for new accounts.
Accounts should be left in the state of the terms-of-service at the time of sign-up, any changes to a users setting that materially alter the relationship between service and user should be avoided at all cost because they breach trust.
> You act as if the ads are putting ugly pictures of fat people are flooding your site
Not to mention the fact that his argument had nothing to do with what was being advertised.
I don't mean to say that this justifies this perceived wrong, but it certainly justifies, from their standpoint, to think: "If you're going to use our service, for free, you should at least read our emails (and not filter them to the Spam folder)". Also on their side: they've allowed the ability to opt out.
So you can still drop the service on the grounds of principle, and technically, this is a "bait and switch"...but it's a pretty mild one.
"We may, without prior notice, change the Service;"
Terms of service are a fig leaf, how you act is what matters and these actions are not acceptable, especially not for an opt-out that wasn't there when I signed up.
What is acceptable for you and what isn't is your affair, just like it is my affair what I find acceptable.
I don't think you're helping the discussion with your continued personal attacks ('entitlement', 'disgraceful') so I'll leave it at that.
I am not a disqus user, therefore I have no idea 'recommended content' is their term for paid adverts. I sometimes read jacquesm's site, therefore I could reasonably mistake something[1] with that title to be recommended by him. He dislikes that this should happen without his explicit opting-in to such a system.
He's allowed to be pissed. Is principle so rare to you that you're mistaking it for entitlement?
[1] if disqus wasn't blocked by Ghostery, anyway
(Obviously I'm not saying they stole anyone's TV, but more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones. The principle of "It's free, so I can do whatever I want and you're being an entitled brat if you object" is simply fallacious.)
Long story short: Working for free does not give you free reign to violate people's trust. Something that isn't OK doesn't suddenly become OK just because you were working for free. If you acted under-handedly, don't be surprised when they call you under-handed on their blog. Being free doesn't immunize you from accusations of under-handedness. It does limit their recourse, but they still have every right to be unhappy.
To be fair, "I can do whatever I want" was actually the condition GP pointed out. As other users have pointed out, this was not a surprise to most of them as they were notified about it.
> they still have every right to be unhappy
Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party malicious.
No, I pointed out why it's a perfectly fine analogy ("more extreme examples demonstrate the flaws in an idea better than more subtle ones").
When drawing an analogy, the things need only be similar in the areas being compared. In fact, the more dissimilar they are in other respects, the better, because the whole point of an analogy is to show how similar features behave in different contexts.
For example, if you put forward the proposition, "OJ Simpson is violent because he is black," I might respond by pointing to other well-known black men such as Martin Luther King, who was clearly not violent and is pretty well known as a good person. This does not mean I'm equating OJ Simpson and Martin Luther King in any respect other than their race — in fact, the differences between the men are at the heart of the comparison. They are similar in the aspect being compared (race), but otherwise unlike each other in nearly every way possible.
If any dissimilarity invalidated an analogy in the way you seem to believe, analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be compared to themselves.
> So using it only creates an unnecessary and invalid connection between stealing and what disqus did.
No, it doesn't! I posted a fairly long parenthetical specifically explaining this. Please take the time to read and think about what you've read before replying in the future. It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over.
Again, the difference between the two actions is at the heart of the analogy. Obviously you'll agree that the painter who steals the TV is in the wrong. Nobody thinks it's OK to steal your customer's stuff. The point is that the same justification — he offered a free service, so he is entitled to monetize it in ways that affect you without telling you and you have no right to complain — would appear to apply to the painter's actions. Thus, it is a weak justification. That was my point.
> Yes They do. But they don't have the right to call the other party malicious.
ctrl-F malic -> 0 results
Uh, cool?
I don't think anybody is calling Disqus malicious. Malice is intent to injure someone, and there's no evidence that Disqus was actively seeking to hurt people. I think the accusation here is that the way Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky.
You are calling out for slippery slope, if X is acceptable than 1000X must also be. And since 1000X is not, therefore X shouldn't be.
> analogy would be altogether impossible because things could only ever be compared to themselves.
To be honest, I rarely trust analogies as logical statements. They are good for introduction to a concept but they have an inherent bias towards the view of the constructor which may not be visible to the other side in an debate.
The argument you put forward was that 'I do it for free so I can do anything' is fallacious. Yes, it is. Firstly the argument here is 'You agree that I do this for free, the definition of 'this' may change with time and it is entirely my right to do so' is the actual condition.
> It is very annoying to have to explain this over and over
I am sorry I annoyed you, that was not my intent. I did read it but may be I can't read as well as I hoped I did.
> ctrl-F malic -> 0 results. Uh, cool?
While I am at least a little offended by the snark I would assume that it was my mistake that I annoyed you a lot. English is not really my first language so probably my choice of word 'malicious' was out of place, but you are taking things too literally. Disqus has behaved is inconsiderate and sneaky - I am trying to point out that they notified their users and were not trying to hide anything about this.
Honestly, I see no point continuing to annoy you. So I will shut up.
Perhaps you're confused to the purpose of a TOS. It is not a business plan where the company outlines their feature roadmap.
Obviously he thought, and was correct about thinking, that it didn't include ads.
All the ex-post-facto justifications for the change boil down to something like "But didn't you realize that as an entity in a capitalistic society, the opposing party in your deal is always going to be seeking more revenue?" which is always true of every deal, can be used to justify any change whatsoever, and thus is a rather thin justification.
(1) Comments only (2) Comments and links only on your site (3) Comments, links on your site and 'recommended' links (4) Same as (3) but links may be above comment box
The default setting appears to be (2); I tried this under two different Disqus accounts with three web sites, and that was the setting "Discovery" came up with each time. This doesn't strike me as particularly outrageous -- the links they are inserting are only links to your own articles, not advertising (and not revenue-generating, of course).
That's nonsense.
As jacques mentioned, and the screenshot shows, the ads look like they are personal recommendations by jacques, and this is what is quite sneaky/crappy about this whole change.
If you went the route of using other language like sponsored ads, I think you were in the right, it's your service and you can change it, but this is indeed quite sneaky. It's like me going on tv and saying Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan recommend my app. It's a lie.
I enjoy reading comments (despite their negative vibe lately) since there are still some nuggets of gold amid the asinine BS. The deluge of rubbish is really from unmoderated places (news blogs are particularly notorious), but if an admin keeps on top of these, comments are a beautiful thing. Another blog losing comments is a damn shame. It's just one more nail in the coffin for interraction away from the shadow of walled gardens.
I think this was already mentioned elsewhere on HN, but Stallman was right.
This leaves them with the options of transitioning the business model to something that people are willing to pay for, or finding ways to extract value from their free customers.
I know of one other commenting widget provider who got into this exact same morass, but they have opted to leverage the communities that their customers have created to engage in "influencer marketing", where the site owner cooperates with the commenting widget provider to have an above-board "sponsored conversation" with a third party company.
Since it's unlikely that Disqus will be able to successfully integrate advertisements into commenting feeds in a way that doesn't damage their relationships with site owners, an approach like this shifts the value-extraction machinery away from a site's commenters, who Disqus technically has no claim on, and provides an avenue for mutual profit with the site owners, who have an existing relationship with Disqus.
The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.
Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".
First off, they did provide notice. I received an email about this at all the addresses I have an account under. Maybe the the author didn't and that sucks but this seems like an edge case and he is one of the exceptions, not the rule.
Second, you can turn this feature off which brings me to my next point. Even if they do decide to change this can you really blame them? The thing is we're all using the service for free and on top of it they're willing to share revenue with users. I mean we can't just expect every free service to never monetize. Could they have done it differently? Sure but lets not give in to the temptation to be armchair CEOs here and proclaim that we know that a different model would have worked better for everyone. I give Disqus the benefit of the doubt that they did their homework and decided that this is the best way for them to monetize and still do right by their users.
I use Disqus on my personal blog and I use it as part of an app I'm quite passionate about. In my app (link is in my profile) I use Disqus in much the same way Tumblr does where you enter your short name and your public pages can have comments. As someone using them in these two different ways I empathize with the author especially when it comes to my app as I don't want the ads associated with anything I'm personally doing but at the same time I'm not blaming Disqus either. I use them, in both cases, as an alternative to rolling my own. Their platform is far richer than anything I could do so even if they didn't allow opting out its still a win for me.
In the end this outrage is unnecessary. Disqus made no secret of this, reached out to us, provided a way to opt out, and even offered to share revenue! On top of that they're still a totally free service that's offering us value. The author himself says his blog will no longer have comments because of this. Why? I'm sure he can create a commenting system himself but obviously Disqus is delivering value in a way that's pretty tough to replace.
Come on guys, its one thing to not like these ads but to not use Disqus in protest really isn't hurting Disqus as much as it is the person who stops using them in most cases. They definitely acted in good faith on this one and we need to stop acting like every free service on the web owes us the service we want, how we want it, when we want it. This isn't a charity we're talking about here, its a web startup. I follow jaquesm's blog and I agree with most of his thoughts but I can't get behind this one.
Disqus is sneaky. I don't like sneaky people and more importantly I don't like sneaky companies.
I signed up for a 'comment tag', not for an 'advertising tag'. There is a world of a difference between those two, it changes my blog from a non-commercial one into a commercial one and that is - to me at least - a major shift. On top of that they make it look as if I endorse these links.
To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.
I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.
And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.
> To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.
then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.
I just did.
> I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.
This free service just made it look as if I endorse a bunch of companies and decided to change my site from non-commercial to commercial. That's my prerogative.
> And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.
They may have warned, I definitely did not receive it, they changed the terms of service post the part where I signed up and defaulted me to behaviour under the new terms of service. That is 'bait-and-switch'.
> then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.
Actually, their terms of service bind me and them, sure they can change the terms but those are not the terms that I agreed to when I signed up and I don't go around checking the terms of service every 3 days to see if someone is up to something sneaky.
Whether I paid for it or not is not material.
You agree that Disqus may include advertisements and/or content provided by Disqus and/or a third party (collectively “Ads”) as part of the implementation of the Service.
Now I don't know if this language was there before the change you are speaking of, but if it wasn't I'm sure included in their TOS was that you agree to them being able to amend their TOS at any time to include something like this.
Perhaps you'll think of this next time.
I run a free service with 50 Million daily end users and if I made such a drastic change, users would (rightfully) be upset.
I'm inclined to agree with him that displaying ads on the user's site without explicit opt-in is a major faux pas with the potential to destroy a company's reputation permanently.
Good on you. The only way these companies will figure out that this sort of model sucks is if they lose users/money.
This should be called disqusgate and I'd really expect to hear Fred Wilson on it, if not done yet.
That's exactly what they said they were doing: Did you actually read the post?
They discovered a shady, poorly communicated "feature" had been enabled, so they dropped the service.
As ryguytilidie says below, it is bizarre that behaviours like this are defended, and it needs to become less acceptable of a business life-cycle strategy. I'll point a bit of the finger at the host himself, PG, as he has oft stated that you don't need to concern yourself with revenue, but rather eyeballs. That is inevitably a bait and switch -- get them in on a clean, simple commenting system, sneak ads in (with hilariously misleading emails that they know no one will actually read) later on.
I disagree with this. There is a moral obligation on both parties regardless of the presence of a consideration (payment of money) in the contract.
There is a binding contract, albeit most likely not legally enforceable and of uncertain terms. To consider an extreme, what if disqus has said they were going to include porn links in their plugin area. Some might well consider covert advertising as more insidious than inappropriate porn.
If we're in a bar and you need to use the WC, I offer to watch your stuff but instead I just walk off as soon as you leave the room. Well, "no binding contract" but I've still acted immorally and anti-socially.
Offering someone something free-gratis doesn't give you carte blanche to screw them over as soon as their figurative back is turned.
tl;dr I offer you a free beer, ha-ha I pissed in it, "what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ?"
In fact, I'd almost prefer a comment service start serving up porn on my blog. At least it should, presumably, be fairly clear that it's spam, and not something I've actually endorsed. This "recommendations" feature is essentially Disqus abusing the fact that they can generate content on my site to do one better than the comment spammers they protect us from, and make it look like I'm endorsing their random links. Spammers' wet dream, really (the fact that they're links to well-known publications and not virus-laden sites notwithstanding).
I think the bigger issue here is the entitlement that seems to come with every service online now days. People seem to think they are entitled to demand whatever they like and how they like it for things they aren't even paying someone for. I think the best example of this was all of the whining about Craigslist suing Padmapper because it was ripping off Craigslist content and trying to piggyback off of the work CL has put into building their brand and infrastructure.
He is entitled to be outraged, stop it.
"I just found out that this company was infecting all their users with bubonic plague."
"Stop complaining. It was free!"
Offering something free doesn't make one immune to criticism and criticizing isn't entitled whining. This is fair criticism.
Stasis is good. Let some other site be the one to "innovate".
I think it is more of a feeling of breaking a "gentlemen's agreement". When a free service provides a service for X amount of time (expectation building), and you provide them with lots of data and additional users (network effect), and then suddenly they change the rules, it is upsetting. Being a victim of bait-and-switch is not a pleasant feeling.
By all means, they have the right to shut down their service, or change their policies, etc. But I think their underhanded way of implying the service-user endorses something which they don't is ethically wrong whether there is an existing business relationship or not.
In summary, I feel there is a set of things I absolutely have the right to demand of free services. There is a different set of things which I would prefer they not do, but are completely within their rights (shutting down the service, charging for it, changing the way their comment model works, anything like that).
That said, I don't think your example of Twitter is a good one. They're too different for that to work. But I don't think getting into that would be very productive for anyone so rather than doing that I'll just say this: while I get where you're coming from I think you're expectations are just north of being totally reasonable. The core if it makes total sense but it starts to unravel when you consider your expectation that you want to " trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service". That right there, the way I read it, means either "I expect your company to provide the exact same service and follow the exact same policies that I signed up with forever" or "you can only change your service and/or policies when it benefits me". That's unreasonable. No company on earth keeps its policies and services the same forever. They change every now and then. It upsets people and sometimes a change is negative for us but we adjust and move on.
I get why you're leaving but still don't think Disqus is in the wrong. They obviously need to change their service to continue to provide the service. For some, like you, that's not acceptable but its still not that big of a deal. One thing I think you're forgetting is that there's a huge gap here between what you experienced and what the reality is.
What you experienced what a major change in service without your consent or knowledge of it at all. That's certainly a reason to be upset.
But the reality of the situation is that your case is an exception. Disqus did provide warning and a way to opt out. Now, had you not missed the announcement about this would you still feel the same way today?
To be clear, I'm not telling you you're wrong to feel this way. What I'm saying is that it's wrong to characterize Disqus' actions as being sneaky or in breach of trust because they did provide a warning and a way to opt out - you, unfortunately, just happened to not get the memo. That sucks.
(1) I don't expect them to deliver a certain service 'forever', they can shut down if they want to, I understand that
(2) they can change their policies but they can't (or at least, should not, it is painfully obvious that they can) make it opt-out if it is a major change (and to me, adding stealthy advertising is a major change)
(3) they can't use my name to make it seem as if I am on board with something when in fact I am totally not on board with that
(4) I'm fine with them acting in this way, but then they have to accept that I'll call them out on it
(5) web services (especially embeds) should default to grandfathering in older users
(6) This change does not appear to me to be in line with accepted practice and legal requirements for advertising, as such they are making me part of something I do not wish to be a part of, stealth advertising is something I am very much against.
(7) Had I received the announcement and had I seen that it was 'opt-out' I would have killed my disqus account immediately. Opt-out is the wrong way to make changes like these. To have no positive confirmation for a change like this is not acceptable to me.
(8) I feel they are sneaky because of the way the ad blends in, because apparently when I'm on my home machine those ads are not there (or at least, they were not until yesterday) and I feel that such changes should never be forced.
Um, I was really expecting to read: "...they can start charging me if they want to." And then your Twitter comparison too makes me think you really expect a free service, but one that cost money to operate, not to attempt to have an actual business model at some point in the future. Why would they just shut down before trying to make money?
How did you make money with the web cam thing?
Number 3 is especially important I think. It's especially sneaky to make it look like you're endorsing something you aren't or, worse, never even heard of.
As for number 6 I'm no lawyer nor do I even have enough casual knowledge of this sort of thing to know anything about it so I'll take your word for it and if that really is the case then I'd wonder why they're not in any trouble over it yet.
Where we differ here is on what we believe we're entitled to and when I use the word 'entitled' I'm not saying it in the usual "oh too many people think they're entitled to XYZ with free services these days" sense. Maybe "expectations" would be a better word but that's not it either. Yes, I do believe too many people feel too entitled these days especially with free services like this but that belief isn't absolute and I do believe there are some things we as users of any service free or not are entitled to, almost like a web user's bill of rights. Those things, in my mind are:
1. Notice of changes to service and policies
If a policy is going to change or a feature is going to be added, removed, or modified we should get some sort of notice via email, blog post or preferably both.
2. The right of free users to keep their active accounts for as long as the service stays in business
If I have a free Google account I expect that so long as I'm using it reasonably often Google won't decide one day to just get rid of all free accounts.
3. The right to continue using the core offering regardless of feature additions, subtractions, or modifications for any other account type.
So as an Instagram user I should be able to take, post, like, and comment on photos as that is the very core of the product. If one day Instagram has paid accounts I'm not entitled to any of the upgraded features but I should never lose the ability to use the service in its most basic ways because I'm using it free.
Those are the three "rights" I think we should have and even then they're still more like requests because we're still at the mercy of the provider until we pay. But generally, a free service provider who acts in good faith would follow those 3 rules. Now I think wanting the ads to be opt-in is more of a nice-to-have than something we should absolutely expect. I don't think its reasonable because users probably won't take notice at all as it requires effort. But by having it be opt-out, those who care will take the effort. It's really a win-win. Those who care don't have to deal with it while those who don't care get to share the revenue.
Your line was crossed and you left and no one can't respect that. I have different limits and think mine are a little more reasonable considering it's a free service.
I actually just registered the domain 'userbillofrights.org' because of your comment. Even though I don't agree with you here I think there's still a lot I do agree with and I want to invite you to help me write a user's bill of rights and maybe put it out there and get some free service providers to "endorse" it and maybe even try to compile a list of services that adhere to the user's bill of rights so people can see who they're dealing with before signing up. It's probably a dumb idea but I think it'd be fun. We can start with Disqus.
It's not something you can just announce and then do. There is no possible way it is okay to make "we're going to use your voice" as an opt-out feature. Without his consent it is just wrong. They could have sent him letters or even left him voicemail messages, but anything short of getting explicit approval makes the appearance of his endorsement a misrepresentation, or more simply, a lie.
I can confirm they contact me as well. On 12/11/12, they sent me an email titled "Growing with Disqus". However,
1) Gmail auto-labeled it as "Promotions", so I didn't read it. Not disqus' fault, just saying.
2) The text is shady; never does it mention specifically that ads will be placed on your site, but dances around the issue before finally saying "if you'd rather not try this feature, you can always turn it off". I likely would not have understood that they were putting ads on my site even if I had given the email a quick read. The subject line sure doesn't help.
I don't mean that I'm outraged or surprised. Just confirming that I received the same email and examining it a bit.
As for the second point, the fact that the ad links are similar to all others: that really IS sneaky, however you look at it.
This is one of the problems with some, and mostly the ad based, modern startups, and it seems like most are taking the lead from Facebook here, but the problem is basically that companies create a product that provides value, as Disqus does. As they build it, they know if they do something like put in ads, you wont use it, so they don't put in ads. However, after they have a bunch of users, they realize they need to make money, and therefore change the product to provide less value and put ads in. I feel like a lot of what I see lately seems to imply that we "owe" these companies something(people seem to do the same thing with adblock). I feel no allegiance here, Disqus made a product that people would like, people started using it, and then they took some value away in a fairly shady way. Frankly I wish stuff like this was called out more often. The last thing it needs is defending.
Also, they didn't do anything shady here. If you're following you'll know that they both provided ample notice and offered to share the revenue and you can even opt out. I mean, what do we expect here? Are they supposed to have it be opt-in because that's how we like it and we can't be bothered to log in and tick the box to turn it off? We're not paying for anything here and on top of it we're going to tell them how to run the company like we own stock? This is a business, not an open source project or a charity.
If you want a service to grow and to be profitable you need to be aware of how your shift from growing the user base to monetizing the user base doesn't lose the user base.
Instead, everyone who reads the article in the future will have an one-sided impression of the situation (unless the author edits the post based on the points brought up in this thread) due to the lack of comments.
edit: ok link added at the bottom of the article. I hope that helps, I figured out belatedly that this may have been your way of making a joke but it is a useful addition so thank you for the hint.
Them offering to share revenue makes it stink even worse. Even if it's 100% opt-in, they're basically trying to bribe their users into misleading their visitors.
Terms like "benefit of the doubt" and "good faith" don't apply to companies that do business like that.
I have two blogs using Disqus and, as the admin, I did not receive notifications for either one, so, they did not provide notice to everybody.
So when they changed the service from comment hosting to adding covert advertising they sent an email with a title along the lines "disqus are adding adverts to our comment service" and made it clear the adverts would be masked as regular content? (Can someone post the email?)
Presumably, as they acted in good faith, they also noted to users which jurisdictions this would cause legal problems in? (masking paid adverts as regular content).
Also, there must be a cheque waiting for the OP now - you wouldn't put advertising in place without paying after all - would be interesting to know how much that is for and what the split is?
Surely in good faith you wouldn't modify your service [excellent as it was] so drastically without requiring an opt in?
This has saved me the bandwidth otherwise wasted on ppl's idiotic quips and now, ads.
127.0.0.1 disqus.com
127.0.0.1 www.disqus.com
127.0.0.1 mediadcn.disqus.com
127.0.0.1 parsley.com
I also use a slightly modified hosts file from here:
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
it does a pretty good job of cutting out the crap but I had to add things to get rid of any facebook links, disqus links, etc...
Anyone suggest replacement SaaS comment solutions?
Everything I did last year fulfills the requirements of 'opt-in'. I could have left the old style and never received the new features.
Based on my experience with this exact feature, I think the OP mis-read/didn't read the information provided by Disqus.
Vanilla Forums looked like it provides a neat option to serve the same purpose (embedded comments hosted elsewhere)
http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog-commenters-...
I didn't end up setting it up and have just had the disqus nonsense turned off.
As a web site that gets quite a bit of traffic (blekko.com) It is interesting to see both sides of this conversation. As the 'ops' guy I'm always getting cold called/emailed from salespeople for services that will "drive traffic to your web site" and the business model is all very similar. Apparently it works well for these 'service providers.'
To illustrate, lets make up a company, we'll call it "megatraffic" or MT for short. They call me up and they say, "Chuck we can drive millions of page views your way, which you can monetize with this ad-provider network. We'll share revenue 50/50, how cool is that?"
Their other guy calls me up and says "Hey Chuck, we make your site visible to millions, for just a small price per click, we'll put a link to your site on the {hundreds/thousands/millions} of sites in our network."
So MT here sells both ends of the pie, they "become" a sort of ad network by charging folks who contribute links to the customer site. And then they also get 50% of the revenue when someone follows that link and then clicks on an ad at the landing page. That's a pretty sweet deal for them, kind of a lame deal for the patsy who is paying and paying. It is like affiliate marketing where you don't realize right away that you are an affiliate.
Then we read about (and I block from our search engine) on a daily basis organized groups of miscreants who then write code to click through these networks to shake loose the pennies and nickels and quarters that the revenue generates. Given Google's publicly reported ad revenue its easy to see how clever people can create multi-million dollar revenue streams with just a bit of programming, maybe a botnet or two, and a complicit traffic aggregator.
All that money just laying there. First you pick up a few pennies, then a couple of bucks, next thing you know you're working to squeeze every click you can off the page like HuffPo.
http://*.disqus.com/admin/settings/?p=discovery
My problem is not that they have this feature, and I don't really care whether they sent out an email or not. My problem is that it was opt-out, not opt-in, from the start, and they tried to deceive bloggers further by making sure we don't see the ads when we look at our own pages. I chose disqus over facebook comments b/c I can see facebook pulling something like this, but it's definitely disappointing to see from disqus.
If true that is a lot nastier than it seemed so far.