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Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#131

Post by davidu »

pifflesnort wrote: post #121
jacquesm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps you should have thought of this before using a completely free "SaaS" offering? Perhaps you'll think of this next time.

You're entitled to this view, but if you are an entrepreneur running a free service, I'd caution you from believing it.

I run a free service with 50 Million daily end users and if I made such a drastic change, users would (rightfully) be upset.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#132

Post by corresation »

camus wrote: post #80
jacquesm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

"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.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#133

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jacquesm wrote: post #20
shortformblog wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever the case, you can turn it off: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/666278#disco...

It should have defaulted to 'off'. You can break trust exactly once.

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).

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#134

Post by lurker14 »

I am curious if all the "free-then-ads" defenders in this thread are (a) purveyors of "free-then-ads" businesses defending their business. (b) young or jaded people who really have grown accustomed to this tactic

Option (a) is Annoying, unpleasant, and bordering on astroturfing, but understandable

Option (b) is sad.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#135

Post by bpatrianakos »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #115
bpatrianakos wrote: post #44

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 t…

"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 doe…

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.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#136

Post by callahad »

116 comments and not one mention of the substrings "ethic" or "moral".

Yes, Disqus is free. Yes, their ToS permit this. But their actions are ethically dubious. I wish we, as a community focused on building startups, held ourselves and our peers to a higher moral standard.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#137

Post by jacquesm »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #123
jacquesm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ju…

Ok, here are my bits and pieces so far:

(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.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#138

Post by MatthewPhillips »

res0nat0r wrote: post #124
jacquesm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I demand nothing. I just exercise my right to terminate this relationship from my end and I exercise my right to write on my own blog whatever I want.

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.

You seem to be suggesting that free services are free from criticism, which is just silly.

He is entitled to be outraged, stop it.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#139

Post by ajasmin »

jrs235 wrote: post #10

"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 a…

A quick google search seems to indicate that disqus is already offering premium accounts. http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466261-prici...

I don't know if these are ads free though.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#140

Post by bcoates »

This might have negative consequences for people running personal websites:

"Bloggers -- You Might Have Already Had Libel Insurance, but you might have lost it by having ads or a tipjar.":

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185312054.shtml

Lots of homeowner's and renter's insurance policies cover libel lawsuits, but many of them would exclude a website that makes or attempts to make even a trivial amount of money, such as by Disqus' ads or affiliate links.

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