> 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.