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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

#221

Post by fakeer »

Happened at a time when I was considering Disqus as my main comment system on my new (being built) blog. The main visual appeal of my weblog is going to be(at least that is what I want it to be) minimal and also engaging - as in discussion.

Looks like I need to search for alternatives now. Maybe sth similar but installed on my servers that I can control, or some other paid option where the main business is handling their customers' reader comments and not advertisement. There might be some with clean and easy interface where a commenter does not have to go through much hassle.

Having said that, Disqus being a free and non-charitable organization one should have seen this coming.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#222

Post by creamyhorror »

PotatoEngineer wrote: post #192
marksands07 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Sponsored" implies an advertising relationship, even if it avoids the dread word - sponsors pay you. "Inspired by your browsing history" is accurate, and is Amazon advertising Amazon - you're on a shopping site, seeing more links to shopping shouldn't surprise you. "Promoted Discovery" is a new and unrecognized flavor of newspeak; it's not just avoiding the word "advertising," it's hard to even recognize as advertis…

I agree that the term "promoted discovery" isn't established and hides the true nature of the feature. I can the logic for choosing it, thought it's not very solid:

- "promotional material" = advertising material (that promotes a product)

- "discovery" = discovery through recommendations from the page owner

- hence, "promot-" + "discovery" communicates "advertising through recommendations"

However, "promoted" isn't quite the same thing as "promotional". What's actually happening is that promotional material is being presented as "recommendations from the page owner". The "discovery" itself isn't "promoted" (what does that even mean?). Most importantly, "promoted" doesn't contain the implication of advertising/sponsoring that "promotional" does.

It would have been more accurate to call this Sponsored Discovery or, to be even more real, Sponsored Recommendations. "Sponsored", however, is a bit of a dirty word too, and they probably made the call to euphemize around it, resulting in the confusing term Promoted Discovery.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#223

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

>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?

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#224

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

>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 ?"

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#225

Post by wpietri »

bpatrianakos wrote: post #135
ryguytilidie wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 wha…

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.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#226

Post by benatkin »

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.

Crickets.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#227

Post by benatkin »

patrickaljord wrote: post #104

I flagged this article because I think Disqus is providing a great service free of charge. They give you the possibility to turn the ads off and if you turn them on, you actually get a cut! Sounds like a good deal to me. The negativity and sense of entitlement in this post is very strong and frankly unbearable to me, I hope it won't ruin the Disqus guys day. Making it opt-in would have been a ridiculously bad financi…

Way to be unbiased.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#228

Post by e12e »

mikecane wrote: post #220
thedufer wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most concerning part of this is hiding it from site owners when they're logged in. This feels like an admission that what you're doing is wrong, and that it needs to be hidden from the people who can turn it off. How did you come to that particular decision?

>>>I think the most concerning part of this is hiding it from site owners when they're logged in. I use the free WordPress.com. They don't show me the ads they place on my site if I'm logged in.

OT: I find that interesting. I wonder if that actually leads to fewer converversions to paid blogs? I know of a few (political) blogs that I am surprised use the free tier on such services, because the ads seems so out of place -- but maybe the (non-technical, in this case) bloggers don't reflect much over the ads, because they simply don't see them?

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#229

Post by GhotiFish »

wpietri wrote: post #225
bpatrianakos wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

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.

I don't feel it's unfair to call it a bait and switch. Even if they didn't intend for it to be a bait and switch, it's still a bait and switch.

Re: Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

#230

Post by WA »

jessaustin wrote: post #73
WA wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'd never include any third party JavaScript application that messes with my website.

Not even Google Analytics? It seems like everybody is using that stuff. Incidentally, I agree with you.

Not even Google Analytics. I self-host Piwik for that reason.
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