Disqus launches Sponsored Comments

Disappointing, considering how ubiquitous Disqus is on American news sites. This means we&#x27;ll be seeing more ads and promos on pages already packed with commercial messages.<p>FWIW, I rarely bother reading Disqus threads (glacial load times and poor sorting) and stopped contributing after many of my comments started being flagged as spam.

I am sure they will be pilloried for this, but I never begrudge a company trying to come up with a sustainable revenue model. Nobody ever thought &quot;I sure wish I saw more ads online&quot; and people gripe every time they pop up somewhere new, and yet everyone wants free services. So I say good luck brothers.

It should be noted that Disqus ads are opt-<i>out</i>, meaning that new accounts have to explicitly disable ads.<p>Ads were OK when they were text link to another site a la AdWords: it was clear that they are ads. Native comment ads, however, can be deceptive.

Are the ads going to say things like &quot;my sisters cousin makes $2000 a month by surfing the internet&quot;?<p>Because if so, I think the program has already started

From the OP: &quot;So, What Are Sponsored Comments?&quot;<p>&gt; <i>Sponsored Comments let businesses deliver a message to the people they need to reach. A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get their point across, just like any other Disqus comment. But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that thread or community itself. That’s too disruptive.</i><p><i>So instead, they’re pinned to the top of the discussion environment where things are just getting started. It’s like movie previews.</i><p>So...why not call them by their old fashioned name: &quot;ads&quot;? I don&#x27;t disapprove of ad-based models, but something seems a bit disingenuous to use the term &quot;Comments&quot; when they are not &quot;comments&quot; at all. Unless users are able to respond to them and not have their comments hidden.<p>It&#x27;s hard to imagine advertisers being happy about users getting to attach negative comments onto the ads. And if those threads get to be a snark train, then that pushes all the regular discussion down even further. So either the &quot;sponsored comment&quot;-discussions are hidden, or advertisers AND site-users are inconvenienced.

&quot;Sponsored Comments&quot;, &quot;Sponsored Tweets&quot;... amazing how many people struggle to spell &quot;Spam&quot; properly.<p>Oh well. Won&#x27;t bother me. I&#x27;ve already got Ghostery configured to block Disqus.

I do own a couple websites using disqus but I don&#x27;t care too much about what comment makes it first. But for a personal blog, or a company that makes a lot of money, seeing people advertising in your comments would be a good excuse to start coding a home-made comment system.

How do you propose Disqus earn revenue&#x2F;stay in business. There&#x27;s little incentive for publishes to pay for a commenting platform when they could just go back to using a shitty internal solution. (Although, admittedly, some publishers do pay discuss for enterprise solutions, but if that were more lucrative than ads, why would the bother with ads?)<p>I never cease to be amazed by people who bitch about seeing ads within a product&#x2F;service they use for free. Someone has to pay for this.

It was clear that Disqus had jumped the shark after they first added opt-out ads, but I suppose the slope is slippery.

Any recommendations for alternatives to Disqus that have roughly feature parity and which allow me to pay them for their services?

Honestly I think this is promising. The format is not &quot;shady&quot; or disruptive, and the company seems to have a good understanding that adds done poorly can be damaging.

wonder how much this has to do with them getting rid of showing down votes on comments

This is disappointing, but not surprising. Sigh.

Just reached out to them to test this out.

Yet another reason to avoid Disqus