61–70 of 242 posts
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.
I agree--->Bye Bye Disqus Anyone suggest replacement SaaS comment solutions?
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…
Disqus is sneaky. I don't like sneaky people and more importantly I don't like sneaky companies.
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…
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should have defaulted to 'off'. You can break trust exactly once.
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 th…
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.
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.