

Disqus launches new website - zeeg
http://blog.disqus.com/post/56451685463/our-new-site-same-steak-more-sizzle

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sergiotapia
The new wibble-wobble of the bubbles distract me a lot. Ask yourself, "What is
Disqus?"

Found by scrolling down:

"If you’re passionate about writing and sharing, Disqus helps you build a
community of active readers and commenters."

So...what is it? Compare that to the previous version that immediately placed
it front and center: "We're a comment widget you can easily drop into any
site."

I wonder if this will hurt their adoption numbers.

~~~
danielha
Occurred to us too. We're experimenting a bit with how we're communicating to
our intended audience.

We've been testing signup rates and nothing alarming to note yet!

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da_n
> How is everything now free? Disqus’ business now centers around new
> advertising built on top of content discovery.

I appreciate they needed a business model but when they launched this it was
auto opt-in and enabled by default. I had dozens of clients email me
complaining about 'weird ads' appearing on their sites, all mostly completely
unrelated to what they had written or their site category etc (some of the
clients who were female even complained about links to lad-mag style content,
pictures of busty women etc, they were very offended). It felt like a really
dirty trick and I have since migrated all Disqus installs to other solutions,
mostly self-hosted comments. I would be very wary to trust them again given
their history.

~~~
danielha
Sorry about that. We made some mistakes when rolling out from scratch and did
some things that I'd be more careful about now. There was no malice intended
and hope that you'll take another look in the future.

~~~
da_n
Thanks for responding, it is good to hear you recognised there were some
mistakes and it has changed how you will do things going forward. I appreciate
that you needed to explore revenue models and believe you when you say no
malice was intended, I always thought of you as a good company. Unfortunately
at the time I couldn't give definitive answers to my clients about if such a
thing would occur again, so took the decision to just play it safe and remove
Disqus. I will certainly reconsider Disqus again in future hearing these words
from you however. Cheers.

Edit: oh and nice website redesign by the way!

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minimaxir
_As some close watchers of Disqus may already know, Disqus is now a fully free
service. For everybody, for any site, of any size._

This is the bigger news. But which features from the paid were now made
available to the free users? Analytics/SSO?

As an aside, Facebook, Google, and LiveFyre really, really dropped the ball
with their own commenting systems. Disqus really takes the crown.

~~~
sergiotapia
If they're offering it for free now, how are they making money to support
their massive infrastructure? Are they selling personal information?

~~~
bentlegen
From the blog post: _Disqus’ business now centers around new advertising built
on top of content discovery. It’s the way we bring more traffic to sites using
Disqus and how we’re also helping them make money from their communities._

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