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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

#161

Post by shabble »

patrickaljord wrote: post #142
jacquesm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that such ads are called 'stealth' ads and are quite possibly not legal in plenty of places? 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.

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 c…

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?

[1] if disqus wasn't blocked by Ghostery, anyway

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#162

Post by jacquesm »

traeblain wrote: post #60

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 ne…

They are stealthy because of how they are not labelled as ads.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#164

Post by Turing_Machine »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #138
res0nat0r wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. To take it to a somewhat ridiculous extreme, what about something like this?

"I just found out that this company was infecting all their users with bubonic plague."

"Stop complaining. It was free!"

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#165

Post by marksands07 »

callahad wrote: post #141
danielha wrote: post #128

Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up. As others in this thread have pointed out, we haven’t really been shy about what we’re doing here. You can see a progress update of how things are going on blog.disqus.com (it’s the second post down as I write this). We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Dis…

> advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery) Oh, come on, you guys are better than this.

Have you seen Twitter's "Sponsored Tweets", Facebook's "Sponsored Stories", Amazon's "Inspired by your browsing history". Ditching the word "advertising" is nothing new and we all use sites like these every day.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#166

Post by kamjam »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #146
danielha wrote: post #128

Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up. As others in this thread have pointed out, we haven’t really been shy about what we’re doing here. You can see a progress update of how things are going on blog.disqus.com (it’s the second post down as I write this). We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Dis…

Hi Daniel, why was it not opt-in? You describe it as a "revenue sharing" program, but did not ask your customers if they wanted to be part of it. You assumed their silence meant that they did.

Because that's how most options that are likely to make money are rolled out these days. Disqus are not the only one using these tactics.

I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will know the one I am talking about. But it's things like pre-selecting paid for delivery options, adding travel insurance to flight cost etc etc to drive up costs but then make it not obvious how to remove those items... kind of reminds me of those tactics.

Most of the things rolled out in Facebook I found out through HN or other friends posting. It's not always obvious (though in this case it looks like everyone else got he email except the OP)

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#167

Post by BSousa »

shortformblog wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#168

Post by ChuckMcM »

jacquesm wrote: post #81
ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

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…

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 agree that would be a great way to structure the updates from the perspective of the blog service provider.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#169

Post by jrs235 »

drusenko wrote: post #92
omni wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still be the product if you're on the free end of a freemium model. LinkedIn is an example.

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!

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#170

Post by euroclydon »

jacquesm wrote: post #137
bpatrianakos wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(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?

How did you make money with the web cam thing?

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