

A Commenter's Rights - dnaquin
http://blog.disqus.net/2008/05/30/a-commenters-rights/

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tptacek
Are you kidding me?

Look, I know that this makes marketing sense for Disqus. "A commenters rights:
to post their comments on a system like Disqus!"

But, as co-proprietor of a fairly popular blog (for the space we're in), this
seems exactly ass backwards to me. Blogging isn't about making 1000 little
Slashdots. If your comments mean that much to you, _they shouldn't be
comments_.

Get a blog.

Don't get me wrong. I love comments. The comments on our blog are very often
better than our blog posts. I LOVE our commenters. But the market solves this
problem nicely. People also read us for the comments. We have every incentive
to publish every non-spam comment, and that is in fact our policy.

If you want rights, if you want archival access to your work, if you want an
edit workflow, what you want is your own blog, and you should have one: more
people should be blogging.

Note also: Hacker News fails some of these proposed tests.

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andrewparker
I'd add that the publisher should have a syndication option for the comments.
In other words, the publisher should get a non-exclusive, free right to
syndicate all the comments along with the original blog post. A conversation
and the corresponding blog post should always be able to go hand in hand.

~~~
diego
Yet this is part of the conversation about that post but it's happening
outside the blog. People will discuss a blog post wherever they want, and
every conversation will be different. I'd rather discuss a Techcrunch post
here than on Techcrunch, for example.

Someone posted an article about this yesterday:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203575>

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maxklein
Awwww, did you by any chance just take a shotgun and blast away half of your
foot? You seem to be forgetting something - it's not the users responsible for
the adoption of disqus, it's the blog owners. Disqus may have many users, but
your ONLY customers are the hundreds of blogs using the system.

Including me.

What you just did there is that you told your customers - you are not
important, we care about your end users. You are running a B2B shop and you
suddenly announce that you are doing things to serve the C that comes after
the B. You care about the customers of the business you serve, and not your
actual customers. That makes me unhappy, disqus. I want you to want to please
ME, because I'm sticking your commenting system on MY blog. I don't want you
to bother about pleasing all the other people. If you wish to go ahead with
pleasing the blog readers and fucking over the blog owners who installed you,
then go ahead.

But excluding me.

~~~
wmf
In what way does this hurt blog owners?

~~~
maxklein
It shows that disqus wants to keep the comments separate. What do I do when
disqus suddenly puts ads on my blog? Or disqus suddenly decides that my blog
does not meet their filter because I'm too controversial?

They yank my comments. From that blogpost, their attitude is - we and the
comment makers own the comments. You blog owner are nothing in this equation.

That's pretty arrogant.

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albertcardona
When it comes to comments, I agree with Joel: comments off, get your own blog
to create your own voice.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/20.html>

