Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

I have to disagree even as someone relying on Disqus in a few different ways.<p>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.<p>Second, you can turn this feature off which brings me to my next point. Even if they do decide to change this can you really blame them? 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. Could they have done it differently? Sure but lets not give in to the temptation to be armchair CEOs here and proclaim that we know that a different model would have worked better for everyone. I give Disqus the benefit of the doubt that they did their homework and decided that this is the best way for them to monetize and still do right by their users.<p>I use Disqus on my personal blog and I use it as part of an app I'm quite passionate about. In my app (link is in my profile) I use Disqus in much the same way Tumblr does where you enter your short name and your public pages can have comments. As someone using them in these two different ways I empathize with the author especially when it comes to my app as I don't want the ads associated with anything I'm personally doing but at the same time I'm not blaming Disqus either. I use them, in both cases, as an alternative to rolling my own. Their platform is far richer than anything I could do so even if they didn't allow opting out its still a win for me.<p>In the end this outrage is unnecessary. Disqus made no secret of this, reached out to us, provided a way to opt out, and even offered to share revenue! On top of that they're still a totally free service that's offering us value. The author himself says his blog will no longer have comments because of this. Why? I'm sure he can create a commenting system himself but obviously Disqus is delivering value in a way that's pretty tough to replace.<p>Come on guys, its one thing to not like these ads but to not use Disqus in protest really isn't hurting Disqus as much as it is the person who stops using them in most cases. They definitely acted in good faith on this one and we need to stop acting like every free service on the web owes us the service we want, how we want it, when we want it. This isn't a charity we're talking about here, its a web startup. I follow jaquesm's blog and I agree with most of his thoughts but I can't get behind this one.

They've been doing this for months, and it's done revenue-sharing style, so if you're getting a lot of comments, you stand a chance of making a couple of bucks through the ads. (If you go to your admin page and click Analytics, you'll see the discovery tab which tells you how much you've made.)<p>I've gotten multiple emails on it, so it certainly wasn't a bait and switch. A piece from November on the matter:<p>--<p>The new Promoted Discovery for Disqus was a major release for publishers like you who are seeking ways to drive business around content, community and conversation. We’re very excited about the results so far. There’s strong engagement in discovered content and excellent flow of new high quality traffic for websites using Disqus. This tells us it’s winning for both publishers and their readers.<p>We’re only getting started. As we grow, we'll continue to evaluate new opportunities for you to grow and make money with us. We think you’ll like them because, like Promoted Discovery, they will be complementary to the user experience. If you’d rather not try out these features, you can always turn them off in your settings.<p>The next feature we’re piloting lets you get credit for the traffic you drive to ecommerce sites like Amazon or eBay. If you already do some form of affiliate linking, we do nothing to those existing links. Soon, you may begin to see the impact of these in your reporting dashboard (we’ll be rolling this out slowly over time). Of course, all of this happens seamlessly behind the scenes — the experience for your readers doesn’t change at all. You can learn more by reading this page.<p>At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible. As always, I welcome your questions and feedback.

Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up.<p>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).<p>We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery). I don’t think “bait and switch” is accurate in describing how we approached this. It was about a year ago that we started talking publicly about the idea of a revenue-share ad product within Disqus.<p>As our ideas matured, we started sharing those details with our userbase. This was about 6 months ago. As with many of the things we do, Promoted Discovery was rolled out gradually so that we could learn and get better. Along the way, we blogged, sent out emails, and surveyed users. We’ve done half a year of messaging and we’re still not done with the full roll-out. It sucks that our messaging didn’t reach you, but you should know that you can configure how everything works, or opt out completely, on disqus.com/admin/settings. When new users sign up, they also are introduced to what Promoted Discovery is and have the choice to configure it.<p>As always, we’re learning through feedback. Especially with the product. Are we finished with the advertising product? Not yet — the product has plenty of room to grow and get a lot better. But it’s performing well for many publishers and they’re happy with the revenue that’s coming in. We care about that because our core discussion product is going to get even better because of it.

"If you aren't paying for the product/service then you are the product/service being sold."<p>EDIT: Wow. Why the downvotes?<p>Do people still not understand this saying? I understand it hurts if/when you get burned but it shouldn't come as a surprise when free services change to something less desirable to monetize their business models. I wouldn't be surprised if they soon offer paid "premium" accounts that don't show ads.

I completely agree with Jacques that they should have been up front with him about the change, shortformblog suggests that they were with them, so perhaps the blog provider wasn't passing along the email? What ever, its annoying I'm sure to wake up and find you've gone commercial!<p>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.'<p>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?"<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

On first looks I'd say this is probably in violation of advertising regulations.<p>In both Europe and the US there is a requirement for any advertisements to be clearly marked as advertisements and separated from other content.<p>For the US see FTC 16 CFR Part 255 (Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising):<p><a href="http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf</a><p>For the UK the ASA CAP rules:<p><a href="http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/Display-Code.aspx?CodeId={94A142F4-6CFD-44BC-80A6-2B01624492F5}&#38;ItemId={747AEFC3-F2CE-4A69-B97C-110310A2E924}" rel="nofollow">http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/Display-Code.asp...</a>

I have an aversion to hosting 3rd-party functionality on my sites for this very reason.<p>They do not work for you, they do not answer to you, and their motives are usually quite different than yours.<p>Thus, don't be surprised when they act to satisfy those motives in ways that you may not entirely agree with.

Whether it's comments, posts, email, OS, government etc... <i>what you don't control, you don't own</i>. Period.<p>I enjoy reading comments (despite their negative vibe lately) since there are still some nuggets of gold amid the asinine BS. The deluge of rubbish is really from unmoderated places (news blogs are particularly notorious), but if an admin keeps on top of these, comments are a beautiful thing. Another blog losing comments is a damn shame. It's just one more nail in the coffin for interraction away from the shadow of walled gardens.<p>I think this was already mentioned elsewhere on HN, but Stallman was right.

So this has been going on earlier than December, at least as early as October, according to this Disqus blog post (which says they started it in August):<p><a href="http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-discovery" rel="nofollow">http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-d...</a><p>So how sure is the OP that he didn't just miss the emails/announcements about it? That said, yes, those links are kind of annoying (especially when unstyled) and can clash with the content.<p>As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.

Thank you for reminding me to check if I could finally delete my account - I can and I did. It was impossible to delete accounts due to an "issue" in their system for the last 3 or 4 months and was only fixed within the couple few weeks. I only realized it because I found posts that I'd made anonymously years prior were showing up when I Googled my name. I was horrified. These posts were just one-off comments that served no benefit to being associated with my primary account, but the idea that this was happening to people hoping to stay anonymous in more serious situations was still eye-opening.<p>I assume that comments left without being logged into a Disqus account (but while passively logged into a Gmail account) were automatically associated with your email and indexed by Google under your real name without any verification on your end. Disqus thinks that this is some sort of beneficial feature rather than a potential breach of privacy, and has you go through and remove these posts after-the-fact. There was no way to disassociate the comments from my account than to delete them, so while I didn't actually want to remove the comments from the contexts they were in, I had no choice.<p>Today it tells you that there are "guest comments" that are associated with your email address, and asks if you'd like to merge them, but doesn't show you what they are nor is there an option to delete them before merging. I don't want to merge comments into my account that I can't even see first, and I'd much rather delete my account entirely than risk having them continue to be associated with my namesake.<p>These things, in addition to these suggested ads which are disguised as posts also written or endorsed by the author and in my experience totally unrelated if not straight-up offensive (saw a recommended link on a serious blog promoting an article on some famous floozy's nip slip) have completely put me off to using Disqus and commenting on sites that utilize it. Whether or not they are deliberately trying to be shady or if their UX just sucks, it isn't worth it to me.

The real problem is the tech world's lack of an ability/strategy to come up with a sustainable revenue generating business model before hooking (crack-like) millions of users to their service.<p>Users get used to these free world-class services and when the companies inevitably have to come up with a way to stop flushing investor money down the toilet, users bristle at this.<p>The bigger problem is this, in a world of free services, how is a service with a sustainable business model supposed to compete? As a user I'd rather use them, but they simply can't exist in this kind of artificially created economic ecosystem (steel dumping comes to mind).<p>I'd say "buyer beware" but we're not exactly the buyer here are we?

I never got an email as well. Also looking at settings they have also started modifying your links to add affiliate ids. <a href="http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/851667-affiliate-guide" rel="nofollow">http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/851667-affil...</a><p>Both these were turned on by default. Terrible move. I understand that they have to monetize but turning these on by default is not cool.

I don't know why you keep calling this stealthy or a bait and switch, I've received emails on this. Also at one point, Disqus was showing me that I was not using the latest "theme/style" and that I should upgrade. And in doing so, it would enable features such as recommended and related content.<p>Everything I did last year fulfills the requirements of 'opt-in'. I could have left the old style and never received the new features.<p>Based on my experience with this exact feature, I think the OP mis-read/didn't read the information provided by Disqus.

I didn't notice this happening on my blog either until a friend notified me. When I looked at my blog post, the ad space was just filled with my own blog posts, so I thought it was cool, since users will be referred to other articles I wrote. However, for everyone else, those slots were ads and links to blog posts outside my blog. I disabled the feature right away. I have my own ways of making money without Disqus helping out incognito, thank you very much.<p>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.

I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.<p>The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam &#38; bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.<p>Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".

They are obviously not a charity company and its totally understandable the need to make revenue. However, when i sign up for a service and i am asked to link to an external JavaScript file, i expect that file to do as advertised, i can understand the functionality changing a bit without me being notified but not when they do such drastic changes, in that case they should either go with an 'opt-in' option or disable there commenting system until i approve that i am okay with this new functionality. For all those that say 'you can stop using them if you don't like what they do', of course you can but there 'malicious' code still rendered on my webpages right? As an example, what if tomorrow they added 'functionality' to there widget and they started forcing pop ups, would that be okay? There is a certain level of trust needed towards a company that wants me to link some external code on my website that they can change at any given time, actions like that destroy said trust.<p>Here is the thing, if they done it the proper way i am sure most people wouldn't opt-in, if you are running a website that makes a revenue from ads, you probably already have all the ads your webpage can 'support', if you are running a website as a hobby you probably aren't interested to make any sort of revenue so you would rather not have the ads. Its way more profitable for them to just force there way in, specially if they see that there users don't care.

Disqus is in the unenviable position of having a freemium product that everyone wants but nobody is willing to pay for. Their freemium model provides commenting services with the expectation that value-added features or the need for an SLA would compel site owners to upgrade to paid plans in order to use those features. Problem is, customers that are large and important enough to require an SLA are <i>also</i> large and important enough to be able to afford a custom solution.<p>This leaves them with the options of transitioning the business model to something that people are willing to pay for, or finding ways to <i>extract</i> value from their free customers.<p>I know of one other commenting widget provider who got into this exact same morass, but they have opted to leverage the communities that their customers have created to engage in "influencer marketing", where the site owner cooperates with the commenting widget provider to have an above-board "sponsored conversation" with a third party company.<p>Since it's unlikely that Disqus will be able to successfully integrate advertisements into commenting feeds in a way that doesn't damage their relationships with site owners, an approach like this shifts the value-extraction machinery away from a site's commenters, who Disqus technically has no claim on, and provides an avenue for mutual profit with the site owners, who have an existing relationship with Disqus.

@jacquesm I felt the same way and got mad at disqus when I saw they did that without my consent. I turned off the "feature" and started looking for alternatives.<p>Vanilla Forums looked like it provides a neat option to serve the same purpose (embedded comments hosted elsewhere)<p><a href="http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog-commenters-into-engaged-community-members" rel="nofollow">http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog-commenters-...</a><p>I didn't end up setting it up and have just had the disqus nonsense turned off.

Interesting. I was wondering what is going on with the flagging of this article, it is much lower in the ranking than you'd expect looking at the age and the accrued points. It took me a while to find that disqus is a YC company, so that's why there are so many flags.

116 comments and not one mention of the substrings "ethic" or "moral".<p>Yes, Disqus is free. Yes, their ToS permit this. But their actions are ethically dubious. I wish we, as a community focused on building startups, held ourselves and our peers to a higher moral standard.

This is why I never even thought about using disqus. No comments anymore in the blog, and old comments lost? Not good...

It's not a bait and switch - that's hyperbole at its finest. It's just something you don't like that you weren't notified about but still <i>optional</i>.

Somehow Ghostery saw this coming a long time ago... it seems like anything running across multiple sites turns to advertising for revenue eventually!

Does anyone have a link to a site that's currently showing these adverts? I can't find any with ad's showing

This happened last year to one of the sites I manage which uses Disqus. I did not receive notice either, it just happened. And after I turned it off, it got turned on again in December.<p>Like Jacques I found this incredibly annoying. But unlike Jacques, I decided that the annoyance was outweighed by the convenience that Disqus gives me. We went with Disqus because it was a good UI and easy to implement--that has not changed. I just have placeholder now to check that setting every month or so.

This might have negative consequences for people running personal websites:<p>"Bloggers -- You Might Have Already Had Libel Insurance, but you might have lost it by having ads or a tipjar.":<p><a href="http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185312054.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185312054.shtml</a><p>Lots of homeowner's and renter's insurance policies cover libel lawsuits, but many of them would exclude a website that makes or attempts to make even a trivial amount of money, such as by Disqus' ads or affiliate links.

If those are ads, per FTC rules they need to be marked as ads. "Recommended Content" does not = ads, if anything it equals a false endorsement, which is mislabeling, something worse than an omission by some respects.<p>Some one decided "Whats this?" is all they needed. That might be more passable if it was hosted on a site which they own, but its not, its being syndicated to countless other publishers, and in effect hijacking those publisher's own credibility.

Just checked my site and no ads so I'm not sure. Perhaps they are a/b testing this?

I wouldn't know, I've redirected all the disqus hostnames to 127.0.0.1<p>This has saved me the bandwidth otherwise wasted on ppl's idiotic quips and now, ads.

I can't say I'm impressed here.<p>In the process of being all self righteous and morally outraged, you have killed the comments contributed by your audience.<p>It strikes me as odd that I kept coming back to your blog, mainly to see whether my comment #775739854 of ~January 23rd was still pending moderation. That post represented considerable effort and it included remarkable data points highly relevant to your post subject.<p>I noticed I wasn't really the first person to actively <i>bump</i> his comments in order to get noticed. Also, this was the second time I posted said comment at that very article. Somehow, the first one got mysteriously missing, after having been pending for moderation. So all of this leaves me wondering whether you were just not ready to maintain your blog, including comments.<p>Here is the gist of the comment (I can't reproduce the version anymore, since you ... destroyed it):<p>&#62; <a href="http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster-than-c#comment-775739854" rel="nofollow">http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster-than-c...</a><p>===================<p>Hmm. I might be missing something.<p>But I too read that article you linked, and decided to whip up something in C++. Here's what I wrote, largely unoptimized: <a href="https://gist.github.com/4590998#file-cpp-version-cpp" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/4590998#file-cpp-version-cpp</a><p>To my surprise, it was ~40x faster than your C version... (tested with the original test input replicated 2500 times). Here's the timings (makefile included in the gist I linked)<p>sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./cpp-version &#60; input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 0m2.187s<p>sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./c-version &#60; input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 1m30.358s<p>(the md5sum is just there to verify that the results are identical)<p>===================

I don't understand why people scream bloody murder when businesses attempt to make money off of something they give away for free.<p>Of course they have to run ads.<p>And while it's bit of a grey area to display ads as "recommended content"...Disqus hardly invented this practice. And based on the design and colour scheme, it's fairly obvious that the "recommended content" links are part of the Disqus widget (and generated, provided by Disqus).<p>On second thought, I can imagine the average user is not savvy enough to make see this distinction. But I honestly don't care. If you hate ads so much, open up your wallet and pay the "true" cost of your free lunch.

Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. Shortcut. If you use cloud services to shortcut your infrastructure, you are not in control. Use another provider for your billing system, you are not in control. Same here. You are not in control so you have no reason to complain when they try to make money. If you want to do it right, just use some software that keeps the comments and all infrastructure on your site. Simple. Or better yet, write your own. It is not that hard at all.

If you're not the customer you're the product. There's no longer any excuse to think otherwise.

I don't know why the author is annoyed at this, it's not as if he's paying for the service.

I learned about this before and this made me explicitly modify settings for blogs I have. I turned it on for two small projects and I would be happy to share results in a month if anyone wants to see (unless thats against TOS)

Honestly, this is not an issue for me at least. I've got several disqus' and disqus does a tremendous job in handling comments. It's a lot better than paying $999 for VIP disqus for sites that don't even make a dime.

Out of curiosity, anyone have a good alternative? I'd like to investigate alternative comment boxes for static content (even if I have to host them elsewhere myself, eg. open source solutions).

I agree---&#62;Bye Bye Disqus<p>Anyone suggest replacement SaaS comment solutions?

I use disqus on my blog for comments. I just checked and I'm not getting what he's getting, and I do have one post that gets ~40 views per day. Weird.

You can turn it off here:<p><a href="http://*.disqus.com/admin/settings/?p=discovery" rel="nofollow">http://*.disqus.com/admin/settings/?p=discovery</a>

Nothing is free.<p>If it's free you, or the attention you provide / facilitate is the product.

Formerly free service now tries to monetize. More news at 11

You can turn the "feature" off... It's in settings.

You can turn it off...

Just turn off the feature and stop whining.

I am curious if all the "free-then-ads" defenders in this thread are (a) purveyors of "free-then-ads" businesses defending their business. (b) young or jaded people who really have grown accustomed to this tactic<p>Option (a) is Annoying, unpleasant, and bordering on astroturfing, but understandable<p>Option (b) is sad.

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

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.<p>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 financial decision as they would have lost revenue from millions of sites already. I hope this change will help the company be profitable and improve their product.