It’s Time To Disqus (YC S07) Our Community

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/30/techcrunch-disqus-community/

by cwan • 16 years ago

44 33 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

parislemon• 16 years ago

nice hacker news shout out in here :)

samratjp• 16 years ago

Kind of surprised it took them this long to include Disqus. Then again, sometimes I wish HN had Disqus.

pointillistic3• 16 years ago

HN, is the best commenting on the Internet, not even close. The minimalist design and usability is superb, there is no match for HN comments period.

commandar2• 16 years ago

I do occasionally find myself wishing I could collapse threads here like on reddit.

starnix17• 16 years ago

I like Disqus and how easy it is to implement, but does anyone else feel like it is cluttered?

I don't want a commenting system that allows me to "like" comments, vote them up or down, subscribe via email, etc.

To be fair though, I'm sure all of those features can be hidden via CSS and Javascript. If you look at some custom Disqus implementations (like Engadget) they do a good job of this.

pointillistic3• 16 years ago

The fact - hackers often neglect usability and graphic design, sadly Disqus is an example. Clean minimalist design separates them from a killer app.

timdorr• 16 years ago

They can be hidden via CSS very easily. .dsq-options { display:none } Boom, gone!

Their implementation is very clean. Especially compared to past implementations, which were rife with buttons and links and all manner of interface foolishness. Every comment has only a few elements to it now: A user header, the comment itself, a like button, and a reply button. The reply screen is fantastically simple and can be further stripped down via CSS if you would like.

I don't get what you have against liking comments. It's the same thing as what goes on here, just without a downvoting mechanism. It surfaces quality content to the top in a democratic way.

Look at it in the context of the whole page. TechCrunch, like a lot of blogs, has a ton of "stuff" going on throughout the page. Compared to the ads on the article, the Crunchbase boxes, and the multiple areas of navigation on the site, the comments are relatively benign and simplistic. They've done a great job packing a lot of complex functionality into a clean package. I think it's already the killer app.

chriskjennings• 16 years ago

We work hard to improve our default theme offering, Narcissus, with every release. Narcissus is designed to look good and perform well in all situations. A consequence of this all-encompassing approach is that in some situations the look can come across as a bit cluttered.

However with only a few lines of CSS you can transform Narcissus to fit the needs of your site--just like Engadget, Thoughtbot and many others have so eloquently done.

Saying this, we hear you. There is definitely a need for a minimalist theme at Disqus and we have some time set aside in the near future to make it happen.

pointillistic3• 16 years ago

So let me just understand this. They are going to hire someone to forge a community by tweeting back with the 1 mil followers?

First Twitter destroyed community by allowing people the insane number of followers through the Suggested Lists and now they what to mine a community in that spam pool?

Really now after all the years?

hasenj• 16 years ago

I find the notion of using a third-party service for commenting a bit ridiculous. The commenting system and the way it works is an essential part of building a community around a website; treating it like a commodity is just wrong.

The way your comment system works is part of what defines your site, and if that part is not under your control, you'll be just an average website with an average community.

Think of all the VB/phpBB/IPB powered forums.

Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

For the same reason, I never use a CMS. If I want to build a website, I will build it from scratch. CMS powered sites tend to all look a like, you can often tell right away when a site is using a certain CMS; by the lack of polish in its design and the familiar menu to the left, or the familiar urls, or the familiar clutter and noise that always accompany sites powered by X (where X is some CMS).

Tumblr does a good job of providing high quality designs, so your tumblr blog will always look polished and professional. But it will also look like the other thousand blogs that use the same theme you're using. You can make your own theme, but if you're a control freak, you'll soon run into walls where there are certain things you want to do with your blog but you just can't.

commandar2• 16 years ago

>Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site".

Depends on the focus of the site. Fact is, packages like VBulletin are very good at what they do, and I find I generally have a more pleasant experience on VB/phpBB powered sites that behave like other forums I visit than I do on sites that try to reinvent the wheel and end up lacking basic functionality just to be different.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

Absolutely. I see no problem outsourcing functional components of your website- granted, the product you outsource to had better be good.

Devilboy• 16 years ago

The big selling point for Disqus is the back-end management system. Disqus is AWESOME at managing your commenters, killing spam and the like. If comments are not your core competency (e.g. Digg or Reddit or HN) then Disqus is a very attractive option.

mikeryan• 16 years ago

So if there's anyone from Disqus monitoring this thread. I was wondering what this meant and how it compared to the features that wordpress/akismet offers and couldn't find a spot on the disqus site where it's really clearly defined.

So that being said, can you explain why this would be better then the tools something like wordpress offers?

angstrom• 16 years ago

I think that's true, at least where the content of the discussion takes a back seat to the bells & whistles.

templaedhel• 16 years ago

You must find a balance though. I would prefer a canned comment solution with good discussion over a unique and hand coded comment system, with flame wars and trolling any day. As for using a cms, it really depends on what cms you use I suppose. Coming from a wordpress background, I can say I am often surprised as to what sites are using wordpress in what ways. While some CMS's restrain you to certain looks etc, (if only due to difficulty of customization) others allow you almost infinite customization. As for Tumblr, the rigid theme guideline and review process, the small (when compared to competing products) selection of themes, and the resulting quality of the themes are part of their unique and yet similar ecosystem and it is part of their image, whether its for the best or not, it seems to be working for them.

mhansen• 16 years ago

I completely disagree, and I'm getting a big "Not Invented Here" vibe.

Disqus comments are excellent. They handle comment threading, email notifications, voting, login (with your choice of about 5 providers), moderation, spam control... the list goes on and on.

Disqus manages all this while making everything look good.

I use disqus on my blog, because I've got better things to do than reinvent the wheel, especially when there's some extremely polished commodity wheels. It would take me months to implement all the functionality disqus gives me for free.

ergo98• 16 years ago

"Treating commenting systems like a commodity scream "I'm an average website", or "I'm not a technology site"."

Load up TechCrunch's homepage with Firebug open and behold the horrors it holds. It is, by far, the most cringe-inducing contemporary site, and it's the single worst example to demonstrate Firefox being brought to a crawl (Chrome deals with its freak show more elegantly).

They may cover technology, but their site shows little technical competence.

To be fair, a good percentage of the issue is the viral spread of page contaminating twitter and facebook junk.

edanm2• 16 years ago

There are many things I disagree with in your comment.

Firstly, TechCrunch is not primarily about the TechCrunch community. It's unlike Hacker News in that way. Hacker News exists to talk about interesting articles; TechCrunch is a newspaper - it exists to write them. So for them, commenting is a commodity.

Secondly, I think your views on CMSs are a very bad strategy (a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, which is bad). They're also wrong - I don't think CMSs looks are generic at all. At least not with a decent CMS, which you can theme. Wordpress, for example, can be made to look completely different from one site to the next.

Lastly, I think you're missing the obvious tradeoff involved. Sure, you're more limited by creating a site using a CMS, but then it's also a lot harder.

photon_off4• 16 years ago

Commenting is a ridiculously underserved market. It's so pathetic that I still enounter old barely usable bbs systems that are still thriving. How is there not a decent, usable threaded comment system, outside of forums? I've said it before: there needs to be a ubiquitous commenting system and it should work like a forum. Disqus only scratches the surface of this and still has seen remarkable success; somebody needs to take it to the next level. If disqus is the best we've got, there's certainly opportunity here.

Add up/downvotes. Even YouTube comments have been made bearable by this. Show/hide children. Easy registration. Multiple threads. Notifications when someone replies. It's 2010 and commenting systems have barely advanced beyond guestbooks.

thedz• 16 years ago

FWIW, at Disqus we've tried making registration as easy as possible. You're also able to show and hide children, though not all sites enabled this. We're also looking to improve notifications, so that area is definitely on our radar.

photon_off4• 16 years ago

Disqus has done an amazing job at improving their feature set. I remember when you guys just started that I couldn't believe you were gaining traction.

(Tangent: If I could suggest anything, it would be having up/down buttons instead of the "like" button, which is both button hidden alongside the "reply" button, and is an important/risky looking form button. I've noticed that only a small percentage of users use the "like" feature, whereas probably a large percentage of people have a strong enough opinion about a comment to take action. I believe the solution would be to make up/down buttons (arrows, actually), putting them in a more visible spot, and making them look risk-free.)

Great job so far, but I just see potential for a much better way to comment and browse comments.

edanm2• 16 years ago

You look at forums as a good example?

IMO, forums are the first thing that needs to be fixed. Stack Overflow/Hacker News have shown us how much better information is when it's organized using tags, comments and the like. And yet, every day, I stumble into some old phpBB, which is terribly organized and impossible to find information in! Splitting up a forum into 10 different areas is so terrible - before I even start seeing information, I already have to understand how everything works and is organized, etc.

I've been waiting a long time for some startup to implement a modern forum system that actually works.

photon_off4• 16 years ago

Absolutely I think forums are great. The biggest thing missing from forums is the up/down voting goodness that brings the best content to the top.

It's important to note that forums and comments facilitate two different things. Forums are really, really good at facilitating discussion, whether or not the best content goes to the top is usually irrelevant (though, I'm claiming it could be made better). I think SO and HN generally suck at this, because I don't know when somebody has replied to one of my posts.

However, SO and HN excel at having great content, and having that rise to the top. I attribute this to moderation and the up/down voting.

I don't think it is impossible to have both features in a commenting system.

> Forums need to be fixed.

Really? There are thriving forums for nearly every topic imaginable. It's probably not due to forums being difficult to use.

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

I've been thinking about this for a long time. The initial problem is that any old forum is going to have a community around it that knows how it works. This makes any change disruptive to users.

Secondly, most information in a forum exists in a manner that is already organized in a certain way to account for the forum. So, you have a lot of content that is already organized and should be easily found.

Hacker News is no different. It's a forum with threads. SO was the first real departure from this. However SO succeeded for reasons besides the organization. First, it had big names behind it who could pimp it out. Secondly, it was SEO'd well. Finally, it made participation a game. The organization of SO isn't really better then what a forum can offer.

So, I'm back to thinking how I'd go about navigating a large, information intensive forum, but it's not easy. SO is great for Question/Answer problems, but that's hardly the only things forums provide.

Wiki's are another version, though very much document-centric. They allow for discussion and interaction, but in a different manner.

Maybe instead of talking about it, I should just code-up one of my ideas and see what people think.

photon_off4• 16 years ago

I don't understand why this is downvoted. Is everybody satisfied with how the majority of commenting systems work? Do I just have high standards?

dotcoma• 16 years ago

How can we - politely, at first - tell Techcrunch to stop linking to us?

cmelbye• 16 years ago

Really, moderators? I'm aware of the compulsive need to prepend (YC xxx) after every Y-Combinator company name, but it just seems like a bit much to do it even for word play like this title.

barmstrong• 16 years ago

One potentially bad thing for TechCrunch: it looks like their comments aren't indexable by search engines right now!

I read up on Disqus and their FAQ says if you use their API (through the Wordpress plugin) it can generate indexable comments. But from viewing the source on TechCrunch it looks like they are using just the normal Javascript comments, which means they aren't indexable.

http://wiki.disqus.net/FAQ#Willsearchenginesstillindexmycomm...

Can anyone confirm this?

cstuder• 16 years ago

I remember reading a comment on Hacker News about Google waiting for 5 seconds before indexing the current DOM. I couldn't find any confirmation for this, other that the current Google Bot, Caffeine, is interpreting some of the Javascript code found on webpages.

It’s Time To Disqus (YC S07) Our Community

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