Debating Disqus - Seems Stupid

May 10, 2008 Author: David | Filed under: Blogging

I’ve thought about it. I checked out Disqus and pondered the idea of using it for this blog. I see that some other bloggers are using it. But, it is a bit of a scary proposition at this point. Why?

I generated some talk in the last couple days about comment fragmention. There are comments on your blog and then there are the ones out on FriendFeed and other similar services. At the end of the day, I don’t personally care where a conversation takes place. At the same time, though, it is nice having comments ON my blog.

What bothers me about Disqus is the notion of completing hosting my comments elsewhere. That is like the complete end game of fragmentation, leaving nothing left at the source. Of course I can display the comments here, but they are stored somewhere else.

So, could I bring the comments back into Wordpress if I chose? From this discussion, it seems the answer is no but they are working on it. And what happens if Disqus goes the way of the dodo? Did I just lose everything? Also, it seems as if you can’t moderate your own comments inside WP anymore. Apparently, they are working on a plug-in for that. So, not only are all my comments now on a remote server, but I have to separately log into a remote server to moderate them?

Fred, from “A VC”, listed his 3 reasons to use Disqus. Problem is, only one of those reasons is compelling: the ability to have shared profiles across blogs. I like the centralization. Kinda like FriendFeed. The other two reasons are mute because it can easily be done with a plug-in. Scott points out the drawbacks of Disqus quite well, actually.

So, it leaves me wondering, why the hell are so many bloggers (over 4,000 of them, according to their site) converting? Do they want the centralization so bad that they’re willing to throw out the baby with the bath water? It seems to me like you would be completely killing all the benefits from having comments on your own site.

Seems like a bonehead move to me at this point.

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May 10, 2008 at 6:22 pm Mark Trapp

David, I think you're missing a change in overall attitude towards how content is valued and contextualized. It's no longer about having awesome content and getting people to visit that awesome content in a specific place where it's easy to monetize that visit, but providing awesome content in a shared ecosystem of ideas. As someone who has been part of the internet culture for some time, you know it's never about beating your way of doing things into people, but seeing how people interact and adapting what you do to that. Everything seems to be trending to things like FriendFeed and Twitter and Disqus, I don't think any amount of saying "it's stupid" is going to change that. Get on board, or be marginalized.
May 10, 2008 at 10:27 pm Corvida

I have a story for you Risely on the FP of SheGeeks
May 10, 2008 at 10:32 pm Phil Wolff

my concern is trust. i've outsourced comments before, only to have the service shut down, losing all the comments. what does disqus do to assure survival of comments, profiles, and threading post-disqus?
May 10, 2008 at 10:36 pm Robert Scoble

I just answered David over on his blog. Just to prove I can spread the love around. :-)
May 10, 2008 at 10:37 pm Corvida

@Phil Don't know, but for Disqus, the bloggers that are supporting it is enough for me. Blame Steven Hodson for starting it all :)
May 10, 2008 at 10:44 pm Robyn Miller

I was using YACCS as far back as 2001, and I just found it annoying to have blog up but comments down. The lack of integration just meant one more thing that could go wrong. It's more complicated today, but heck, my del.icio.us cloud locked up one of my pages a few weeks ago and it took a few hours to figure out what service was trashing me. Call me a simpleton, but there's gotta be another way to add more value to the comment content.
May 10, 2008 at 10:47 pm Hutch Carpenter

@Robert - Automattic with its own version of disqus? That'd be cool.
May 11, 2008 at 7:23 am David Risley

Mark: You *completely* missed my point. I agree with you, but your "awesome content" means two things: jack and crap - IF the service it is on goes bye-bye. By splitting your internal comments off from your content, you now have two points of failure. And I'm more worried about Disqus than my own web host - who has a solid reputation.
May 11, 2008 at 12:50 pm Mark Trapp

David, what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't matter. For the past week, you've stirred the pot a few times on why a group of people is "stupid" for "fractionalizing" the conversation on to things like Disqus and Friendfeed. It's been reading like "Oh, you don't like this excuse? Here's another gotcha!" What I'm saying is, this is where it's going, regardless of how many times you call it dumb or silly or wrong. Get on board or don't.
May 11, 2008 at 5:36 pm David Risley

Mark, all you have to do is look at Phil's comment above to see that what I said IS a possibility. Your blog is an asset and I think it is worth thinking about before giving 100% of your comments to another company. You can say "this is where things are going" all you want, but at the end of the day, bills need to be paid and shit happens. It can happen to Disqus, too. Hopefully not.
May 11, 2008 at 5:39 pm David Risley

BTW, I'm not comparing Disqus to FriendFeed. These are different animals.
May 11, 2008 at 5:45 pm Jason Kaneshiro

Why I'm using Disqus - 1) Threaded comments. 2) User rankings. 3) Comment moderation is better than WordPress. 3) Cuts down on spam significantly. 4) Sidebar widgets that allowed me to remove several plugins, hence speeding up the blog. As for exporting - Disqus exports to an XML file which doesn't have an importation solution but it's close. The pros outweigh the cons in my mind because of less time spent moderating spammy comments.
May 11, 2008 at 5:49 pm David Risley

Akismet does a very good job on spam. CenterNetworks ends their post with another good synopsis of my problems with Disqus: http://www.centernetworks.com/disqus-comment-system.
May 11, 2008 at 7:07 pm Jason Kaneshiro

Believe me, I have much experience moderating spam. I still have Akismet, Spam Karma, a referrer bouncer installed, and still have to daily moderate comments by hand on the posts that do not have disqus installed. I'm tired of spammers and Disqus makes moderation much easier.

13 Responses for "Debating Disqus - Seems Stupid"

Disqus Saved My Site! | SheGeeks May 10th, 2008 at 9:37 pm 1

[...] Disqus. While Fred of A VC mentions 3 Great Reasons to Use Disqus, David Risely thinks it’s pointless and possibly stupid. That’s OK. I’ll give one story as to why installing Disqus was the smartest thing I [...]
My verdict on Disqus: Two thumbs up » mathewingram.com/work | May 10th, 2008 at 10:18 pm 2

[...] was followed relatively quickly by a post from David Risley, in which he said that Disqus seemed “stupid”, primarily because the comments are hosted somewhere else, and therefore they don’t integrate [...]
Robert Scoble May 10th, 2008 at 10:34 pm 3

Keep in mind, my own blog isn’t on my server. it’s on Wordpress.com, a centralized service with millions of blogs. Funny, it’s down tonight for the first time in more than a year. Which sorta argues your case, although my own server would be down too sometimes.

Anyway, I’m looking at putting Disqus in place so that more of our stuff shows up in aggregator sites like FriendFeed. The identity system that comes with a centralized service is good for me too, because it should bring less spam. I hear Automattic is working on its own comment system like that, though, so I might just wait it out.
Ontario Emperor May 11th, 2008 at 1:41 am 4

In my case, Disqus seemed smart. I’m a Blogger user, and my blog is hosted on Google’s servers, so the fact that Disqus is also hosted is not a big concern to me.

What IS a concern is that Disqus content is not visible on my current device - a first generation Motorola Q with Windows Mobile 5 and Internet Explorer 4. (And yes, they’re working on mobile access.)

Other than that, I love the application, and their customer service.

But I am fascinated by the response to your post; from the reaction, it almost looks like you ran over someone’s grandmother! If you question FriendFeed now, you may be sent to a re-education camp…
David May 11th, 2008 at 7:29 am 5

Ontario, that already happened. I questioned FriendFeed’s noise level in a post a few days ago.

Scoble, I do like the centralization of Disqus, as you do. It is just concerning to add a second point of failure. Honestly, if the Wordpress folks did it, I’d be a little less concerned.
WinExtra » Disqus - the non-stupid version May 11th, 2008 at 3:23 pm 6

[...] about their reasons why they like using Disqus but the real discussion didn’t start until David Risley posted as to why he thought using Disqus was - well - stupid. Even though this got a few people riled up [...]
Keep Your Content Fresh! Including Comments | The Marketing Technology Blog May 11th, 2008 at 7:49 pm 7

[...] a handful of these services on the market already, you have to ask yourself how do you control and manage the ton of your content that they own. If they go out of business, how do you recover that [...]
Gomez May 11th, 2008 at 8:36 pm 8

MOOT!!! The word is moot, not mute! For %$@#$ sake, will someone learn the friggin’ difference?
Shawn K May 11th, 2008 at 11:48 pm 9

While I understand where you’re coming from, and I haven’t implemented it myself yet, I think Disqus is a step away from comment fragmentation. They are making a comment service with enough leverage to integrate into sites like friendfeed and social thing, thus making it easier to find some comments. Currently, if somebody comments on one of my posts outside of my blog, I have to hunt it down. With Disqus integration into other services, it makes it much easier for me. They’re still young though, so I am highly curious what their next steps will be.
Mack D. Male May 12th, 2008 at 11:19 am 10

I was going to write the same thing as Gomez…glad he beat me to it.

I share your concerns and have thus far not given Disqus a try. Maybe I will when they have the ability to export comments.
Nancy Cole May 12th, 2008 at 1:18 pm 11

The biggest drawback of a destination site for your comments is that it will eventually draw traffic from your blog. When a user searches a subject, they are likely to wind up on the Disqus site, and not on your blog. We don’t need another destination site, imo. Nancy, JS-Kit.com
Nathan Eckenrode May 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm 12

i don’t particularly care about ‘keeping the conversation’ on my server, or not. i don’t particualrly care about keeping my data on my server or not- does it really matter- not in my case- i write about my baby (biological reproduction artifact) growing up and it really doesn’t matter where the comments are left. and in all honesty, i get more comments now using disqus.

yes i realize my words here are anecdotal and therefore no supportive towards any argument except that not everyone thinks that the comments are a baby that could be thrown out like a bad metaphor. but then again i have no pretension of making a living as a blogger of any sort.
Phil Butler May 26th, 2008 at 4:59 pm 13

This is a very insightful article David. I was one one the fist to write about Disqus, and I must say I was initially impressed. However, Dan and his crew have sort of let me down in several areas. The original platform was extremely promising, but of late several issues have come to light.

Some of these are highlighted by the intuitive readers here, but for the record here are some “real” issues:

1) proprietary login = lock-in: disqus has a proprietary login. this means that a blogger/web site encourages it’s users create an identity within disqus. If the site chooses to remove disqus in the future then all of the identities disappear. If the site uses other web services then it’s
visitors will have multiple logins for one site. Both instances are a disaster.

2) Proprietary visitor profile: All of the data created in the disqus profile is locked into disqus. It cannot be accessed by other services or the visitor. Again, if the site adds other services then the visitor would have to re-upload the same data [avatar, name, etc]. This is a complete
waste of effort forced on the visitor - both the site and visitor cannot exit disqus without losing all of their profile data.

3) Monetization: Disqus is a for profit business. so where is the monetization model? Since disqus bloggers logins, visitor profile data, and community pages they are locked into a business model that is undefined. what if disqus starts showing ads on the community pages and the blogger disagrees? what if they start charging a monthly fee? What if they start a destination site around comments and charge the blogger for referral traffic [don't think this
can happen? ask the sites that started using the "free" powerreviews service and then had to compete with buzzillions, or bazarvoice, etc.] Without a clear path for earning money and simultaneously being locked-in means that sites take a big risk when deploying disqus.

In effort at full transparency, these points are all straight from the horse’s mouth at JS-Kit Khris Loux. I have close relationships with virtually every startup launched in the last two years and the good news for your readers is that Khris is not wrong. Disqus is a fairly powerful platform, but though I predicted it would overshadow KIT in the long term..even I was wrong. Loux and his team are efforting open source and transparency in the most credible ways. Disqus has a model that does not appear to have the user’s interest in mind.

Regardless of how much we like an innovation, we must look at the vision and direction behind it. JS-Kit uses OpenID and allows full disclosure and sharing of their monetization plan and scheme. If appearances were everything, then no one would use another comment platform other than KIT. Yes, I work for them, but I also work for some of the best in the business and hand selected them as entities I wanted to be behind.

If you look at the innovation, service, ideology and long term merit of Disqus versus JS-Kit with any depth perception at all …the evaluation is quite pat.

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues and I will always help. Again, a very perceptive and valid argument going on here.

Always,

Phil Butler