Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

http://jacquesmattheij.com/disqus-bait-and-switch-now-with-ads

by stakent • 13 years ago

410 230 13 years ago

lucisferre• 13 years ago

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

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure I did not have ads until today either, it stands out quite clearly. Maybe it only happens on 'high traffic' days or some other criterion but this definitely blind sided me.

jrs2353• 13 years ago

Perhaps it's based on the content of the page and whether they have ads that tie into the content?

j_s• 13 years ago

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

Pezmc• 13 years ago

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

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

I can re-enable the plug-in and make a snapshot, let me do that.

edit: done, snapshot added to the post, you probably will have to do a shift-f5 to see the update.

mikeocool• 13 years ago

Not sure if this is the same thing the OP is talking about, but there is a 'Recommended Content' section with a bunch of ad-type links at the bottom of each post's comments on http://avc.com

nolok• 13 years ago

That's it.

raphinou• 13 years ago

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

roryokane• 13 years ago

The old comments aren’t completely lost. If jacquesm wanted to, he could export the comments to XML (http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472149-comme...) and then write a custom script to re-import them into a new commenting system of his choice. But unless he does that, then yes, the old comments are basically lost.

riffraff• 13 years ago

I think this should be highlighted: disqus is, at least, until now, quite upfront about telling you that the data is yours and you can take it away, if you don't want to use them anymore.

k3n2• 13 years ago

I have an aversion to hosting 3rd-party functionality on my sites for this very reason.

They do not work for you, they do not answer to you, and their motives are usually quite different than yours.

Thus, don't be surprised when they act to satisfy those motives in ways that you may not entirely agree with.

runevault2• 13 years ago

To me it depends. Something like Disquis where they were giving it away for free I agree. However if it is a for-pay service where you are exchanging money for service, they have some incentive to do right by you, so that your money does not go elsewhere.

k3n2• 13 years ago

Good point, but keep in mind that if they're a business, then the ultimate goal is to make money. It's kind of like the formula prescribed in Fight Club which refers to whether or not a car manufacturer will issue a recall: the decision will most often be based on which result will net greatest economic yield. If the profits from doing X are more than the expected losses (say, due to customer attrition), then that's a good "business decision".

WA2• 13 years ago

Same here. I'd never include any third party JavaScript application that messes with my website.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

Not even Google Analytics? It seems like everybody is using that stuff.

Incidentally, I agree with you.

danso3• 13 years ago

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):

http://blog.disqus.com/post/32684337804/expanding-promoted-d...

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.

As much as I want to switch my blog to Octopress, at least I can have a commenting system through Wordpress.

azundo• 13 years ago

Based on your link above it appears that you can turn off the "discovery box" in the Disqus settings and have "just comments" if you wish.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

Right, until they change things again and you get a new 'feature' for your benefit which you auto opt-in to.

That's the kind of behavior that turned me off from having a facebook account. That you need to review their terms of service all the time to see what they are up to now.

jrs2353• 13 years ago

"If you aren't paying for the product/service then you are the product/service being sold."

EDIT: Wow. Why the downvotes?

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.

tarr112• 13 years ago

My feeling is that the HN community tends to try and focus on unique and specific details.

This quote has become a cliche and doesn't add that much to the conversation.

eCa• 13 years ago

Like many cliches it is proving itself as being true again and again.

So one reason that it (maybe) doesn't add much is that everyone knows it is tue, but doesn't want to think about it.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

"I think the ‘you are not the user, you are the product’ meme should die. It does a dis-service to the complexity of the situation and it masks some much more serious issues with online monetization models, and online privacy in general."

http://jacquesmattheij.com/you-are-not-the-customer-you-are-...

Meta: I went googling for this article, know I'd read it, but not where. I found the coincidence of the author quite amusing.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

I never expected to see that make the jump from 'end user of a service' (say twitter, facebook, google) to 'end user of a plug-in' or SAAS product.

Silly me, I guess I should have seen it coming.

taylorbuley• 13 years ago

I think it's a wholly useful meme. And I think the intention is not for it to educate those of us who understand the complexities of this business; rather, those who don't understand how companies can squeeze non-monetary value from users in exchange for a "free" service.

pfortuny2• 13 years ago

Apart from the other aswers, you may be happy to be the product on an iteration and not on another, and you are free to get angry when people claim they live to make you happy and later you discover that there is a postscript (unless we need to suck).

glesica2• 13 years ago

Why would you ever believe a company that says it exists to make you happy? Companies exist to make money, that is literally true. There is no other purpose. It just so happens that making people happy is often a reasonable way to make money, but if making people happy doesn't maximize profits, then eventually something else must be done.

rscale• 13 years ago

That quote is often wrong.

For example, there are "freemium" business models where the users are segmented by usage level, or by need of additional features. In those models, the "free" users aren't being sold, they're just potential customers and advocates.

Further, this sort of breach of trust isn't limited to free services. There are paid services that start selling advertisements as well.

omni2• 13 years ago

You can still be the product if you're on the free end of a freemium model. LinkedIn is an example.

untog• 13 years ago

I suspect people are downvoting you because they understand the saying perfectly, it's just so overused these days that it's to the point of cliche. I don't think anyone doesn't know this, the more interesting conversation is when we talk about what that means to us and what we do about it.

kevinpet• 13 years ago

You expect something other than downvotes for posting a cliche everyone has seen a hundred times and adds no additional insight?

ajasmin• 13 years ago

A quick google search seems to indicate that disqus is already offering premium accounts. http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466261-prici...

I don't know if these are ads free though.

zeeg• 13 years ago

Does this quote have an origin?

shortformblog3• 13 years ago

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.)

I've gotten multiple emails on it, so it certainly wasn't a bait and switch. A piece from November on the matter:

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.

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.

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.

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.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

I have not received an email, there is no opt-out switch, and honestly I have not seen this on the comment section of my blog until it showed up just now. Elsewhere in this thread there are people that say they don't have it right now so it appears to switch on/off according to some hidden criterion.

Highly annoying.

"At Disqus, our core philosophy is to remain native to the core user experience and provide the best community experience possible."

I hate language like that.

And I'm 100% sure that I have never seen these ads before.

shortformblog3• 13 years ago

Whatever the case, you can turn it off:

http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/666278#disco...

BSousa• 13 years ago

Whether you warned users of this change or not, to me, that isn't the problem. The issue is that they are stealth ads.

As jacques mentioned, and the screenshot shows, the ads look like they are personal recommendations by jacques, and this is what is quite sneaky/crappy about this whole change.

If you went the route of using other language like sponsored ads, I think you were in the right, it's your service and you can change it, but this is indeed quite sneaky. It's like me going on tv and saying Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan recommend my app. It's a lie.

maccard• 13 years ago

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

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

Because a change was made since I first signed up for this and that change was defaulted to 'on'.

brianb722• 13 years ago

If new features in any product/service aren't defaulted to 'on', no one will ever use any of them. Normal people don't change settings. As long as you're notified of the change (which Disqus did through email and blog posts) and it's not a privacy concern, I think 99% of companies will and should do exactly what they did in this situation.

eksith• 13 years ago

Whether it's comments, posts, email, OS, government etc... what you don't control, you don't own. Period.

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.

I think this was already mentioned elsewhere on HN, but Stallman was right.

scottmcleod• 13 years ago

You can turn it off...

antr• 13 years ago

Regardless, it should be opt-in rather than a backstab to the user's trust. Actions speak louder than words, and this behaviour says plentiful of this company's management.

condiment• 13 years ago

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 also large and important enough to be able to afford a custom solution.

This leaves them with the options of transitioning the business model to something that people are willing to pay for, or finding ways to extract value from their free customers.

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.

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.

mmuro• 13 years ago

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 optional.

dholowiski• 13 years ago

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.

daa• 13 years ago

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.

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 & 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.

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".

bpatrianakos4• 13 years ago

I have to disagree even as someone relying on Disqus in a few different ways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ryangripp2• 13 years ago

It might be a win for you because it's "free", but it's not a win for others.

Disqus is sneaky. I don't like sneaky people and more importantly I don't like sneaky companies.

res0nat0r6• 13 years ago

Alerting every single one of their users of an upcoming change before it occurs is sneaky?

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

How would you feel if twitter decided to include (for your benefit, of course) a bunch of advertising next to their button after sending you an email about it and defaulting to 'on'. Would that be ok for you or would you feel that that was not what you signed up for when you decided to embed their button tag?

I signed up for a 'comment tag', not for an 'advertising tag'. There is a world of a difference between those two, it changes my blog from a non-commercial one into a commercial one and that is - to me at least - a major shift. On top of that they make it look as if I endorse these links.

To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.

camus• 13 years ago

you can stop using their service if you dont like it.

I dont understand this sense of entitlement regarding free services.

And it is not like disqus did not warn its users , they did. Dont like it ? use something else.

> To see that happen without my explicit consent is something that is enough to turn me off from that particular service provider because I can apparently not trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service.

then stop using that service , what's the big deal ? did you pay for it ? no. So there is no binding contract between them and you.

res0nat0r6• 13 years ago

Thats the tradeoff you have to deal with if you want to use a free service.

bpatrianakos4• 13 years ago

Like I said, I can totally empathize. No, it's not cool to do that without any notice or consent. You didn't get the notice so as far as you're concerned there was none. I get that, it's totally understandable.

That said, I don't think your example of Twitter is a good one. They're too different for that to work. But I don't think getting into that would be very productive for anyone so rather than doing that I'll just say this: while I get where you're coming from I think you're expectations are just north of being totally reasonable. The core if it makes total sense but it starts to unravel when you consider your expectation that you want to " trust them with the responsibility of not altering our relationship in a material way relative to the terms of service of the moment when I signed up for their service". That right there, the way I read it, means either "I expect your company to provide the exact same service and follow the exact same policies that I signed up with forever" or "you can only change your service and/or policies when it benefits me". That's unreasonable. No company on earth keeps its policies and services the same forever. They change every now and then. It upsets people and sometimes a change is negative for us but we adjust and move on.

I get why you're leaving but still don't think Disqus is in the wrong. They obviously need to change their service to continue to provide the service. For some, like you, that's not acceptable but its still not that big of a deal. One thing I think you're forgetting is that there's a huge gap here between what you experienced and what the reality is.

What you experienced what a major change in service without your consent or knowledge of it at all. That's certainly a reason to be upset.

But the reality of the situation is that your case is an exception. Disqus did provide warning and a way to opt out. Now, had you not missed the announcement about this would you still feel the same way today?

To be clear, I'm not telling you you're wrong to feel this way. What I'm saying is that it's wrong to characterize Disqus' actions as being sneaky or in breach of trust because they did provide a warning and a way to opt out - you, unfortunately, just happened to not get the memo. That sucks.

gaunab• 13 years ago

Ads is one thing, Links titled "Recommended content" something completely different. As the OP writes, the way Disqus presents its Ads make them seem like regular content endorsed by the site's editor. And THIS is the total no-go area Disqus just ventured into, without even taking the minimum precursions by defaulting to opt-in. Bye bye Disqus.

llimllib• 13 years ago

> they did provide notice

I can confirm they contact me as well. On 12/11/12, they sent me an email titled "Growing with Disqus". However,

1) Gmail auto-labeled it as "Promotions", so I didn't read it. Not disqus' fault, just saying.

2) The text is shady; never does it mention specifically that ads will be placed on your site, but dances around the issue before finally saying "if you'd rather not try this feature, you can always turn it off". I likely would not have understood that they were putting ads on my site even if I had given the email a quick read. The subject line sure doesn't help.

I don't mean that I'm outraged or surprised. Just confirming that I received the same email and examining it a bit.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

The message being labeled with "Promotions" is as the result of a filter you created, right?

abraxasz• 13 years ago

I think the main problem is this pervasive habit (not talking only about disqus here) of making controversial modifications (because hey, they must know that a significant part of their users won't like it) and making them the default. I don't think that the OP would have minded so much if the feature was turned off by default. It's like social networks changing their privacy options, and making everything public by default.. but with the option to revert to normal when/if you realize what changed.

As for the second point, the fact that the ad links are similar to all others: that really IS sneaky, however you look at it.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

"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. "

This is one of the problems with some, and mostly the ad based, modern startups, and it seems like most are taking the lead from Facebook here, but the problem is basically that companies create a product that provides value, as Disqus does. As they build it, they know if they do something like put in ads, you wont use it, so they don't put in ads. However, after they have a bunch of users, they realize they need to make money, and therefore change the product to provide less value and put ads in. I feel like a lot of what I see lately seems to imply that we "owe" these companies something(people seem to do the same thing with adblock). I feel no allegiance here, Disqus made a product that people would like, people started using it, and then they took some value away in a fairly shady way. Frankly I wish stuff like this was called out more often. The last thing it needs is defending.

lurker142• 13 years ago

Right, that's what "bait and switch" means.

bpatrianakos4• 13 years ago

That's not totally true. They don't just decide to start putting ads up because one day they woke up and thought "holy shit, we have a billion users! how are we going to support this? Quick! Pull out the ads!". It's more like they intend to monetize in the future no matter what but the only thing stopping them is adoption. They need users to adopt the service first before its even monetizeable. I'm sure if ads or whatever model was profitable from day 1 they'd be using it. It's not a matter of purposely deceiving users, it's a matter of at what point do the different models actually yield revenue. Once they get to that point you start seeing the monetization happen. It can be from day 1 or 5 years down the road but all startups need to make money.

Also, they didn't do anything shady here. If you're following you'll know that they both provided ample notice and offered to share the revenue and you can even opt out. I mean, what do we expect here? Are they supposed to have it be opt-in because that's how we like it and we can't be bothered to log in and tick the box to turn it off? We're not paying for anything here and on top of it we're going to tell them how to run the company like we own stock? This is a business, not an open source project or a charity.

tkaemming• 13 years ago

It's a shame that comments like this one repudiating several of the details in the original article can't be viewed at the location of the originating post.

Instead, everyone who reads the article in the future will have an one-sided impression of the situation (unless the author edits the post based on the points brought up in this thread) due to the lack of comments.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

I'll add a link to the HN discussion.

edit: ok link added at the bottom of the article. I hope that helps, I figured out belatedly that this may have been your way of making a joke but it is a useful addition so thank you for the hint.

onemorepassword• 13 years ago

You're ignoring the part where this is an utterly unethical way of advertising regardless of how it came about.

Them offering to share revenue makes it stink even worse. Even if it's 100% opt-in, they're basically trying to bribe their users into misleading their visitors.

Terms like "benefit of the doubt" and "good faith" don't apply to companies that do business like that.

Ensorceled• 13 years ago

> First off, they did provide notice.

I have two blogs using Disqus and, as the admin, I did not receive notifications for either one, so, they did not provide notice to everybody.

gurkendoktor• 13 years ago

I also cannot remember getting any email from disqus in the last months. Maybe because my blog is in hiatus (like any good blog ;)).

pbhjpbhj2• 13 years ago

>They definitely acted in good faith on this one //

So when they changed the service from comment hosting to adding covert advertising they sent an email with a title along the lines "disqus are adding adverts to our comment service" and made it clear the adverts would be masked as regular content? (Can someone post the email?)

Presumably, as they acted in good faith, they also noted to users which jurisdictions this would cause legal problems in? (masking paid adverts as regular content).

Also, there must be a cheque waiting for the OP now - you wouldn't put advertising in place without paying after all - would be interesting to know how much that is for and what the split is?

Surely in good faith you wouldn't modify your service [excellent as it was] so drastically without requiring an opt in?

tinkmasterflash2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't know, I've redirected all the disqus hostnames to 127.0.0.1

This has saved me the bandwidth otherwise wasted on ppl's idiotic quips and now, ads.

rocky11382• 13 years ago

A great idea. Can you paste your list here? I'd like to add it to my hosts file.

tinkmasterflash2• 13 years ago

sure,

127.0.0.1 disqus.com

127.0.0.1 www.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 mediadcn.disqus.com

127.0.0.1 parsley.com

I also use a slightly modified hosts file from here:

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

it does a pretty good job of cutting out the crap but I had to add things to get rid of any facebook links, disqus links, etc...

ryangripp2• 13 years ago

I agree--->Bye Bye Disqus

Anyone suggest replacement SaaS comment solutions?

codingblues2• 13 years ago

don't you know you can just opt-out..

traeblain• 13 years ago

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.

Everything I did last year fulfills the requirements of 'opt-in'. I could have left the old style and never received the new features.

Based on my experience with this exact feature, I think the OP mis-read/didn't read the information provided by Disqus.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

They are stealthy because of how they are not labelled as ads.

sudonim• 13 years ago

@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.

Vanilla Forums looked like it provides a neat option to serve the same purpose (embedded comments hosted elsewhere)

http://vanillaforums.com/tour/turn-drive-by-blog-commenters-...

I didn't end up setting it up and have just had the disqus nonsense turned off.

sheraz• 13 years ago

I came here to say the same thing. It seems to have the same functionality except your users have to signup either on your site or through some oauth I believe.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

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!

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.'

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?"

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."

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.

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.

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.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

The preferred way in which I think plug-in services should work is that they leave older accounts in the state they were when they signed up under some set of terms-of-service and from the moment of changing the TOS can default new sign-ups to have the newer settings enabled.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

I agree that would be a great way to structure the updates from the perspective of the blog service provider.

spencerfry• 13 years ago

You can turn it off here:

http://*.disqus.com/admin/settings/?p=discovery

natasham25• 13 years ago

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.

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.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

> 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.

If true that is a lot nastier than it seemed so far.

BYK• 13 years ago

And that is of course not true, probably just a coincidence.

boundlessdreamz2• 13 years ago

I never got an email as well. Also looking at settings they have also started modifying your links to add affiliate ids. http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/851667-affil...

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.

bane• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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).

I'd say "buyer beware" but we're not exactly the buyer here are we?

booruguru• 13 years ago

I don't understand why people scream bloody murder when businesses attempt to make money off of something they give away for free.

Of course they have to run ads.

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).

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.

newishuser• 13 years ago

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

rschmitty• 13 years ago

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

patrickaljord4• 13 years ago

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.

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.

benatkin2• 13 years ago

Way to be unbiased.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

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.

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.

mnicole• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

ig1• 13 years ago

On first looks I'd say this is probably in violation of advertising regulations.

In both Europe and the US there is a requirement for any advertisements to be clearly marked as advertisements and separated from other content.

For the US see FTC 16 CFR Part 255 (Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising):

http://ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf

For the UK the ASA CAP rules:

http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/Display-Code.asp...

justhw• 13 years ago

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.

danielha4• 13 years ago

Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up.

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).

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.

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.

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.

callahad3• 13 years ago

> advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery)

Oh, come on, you guys are better than this.

danielha4• 13 years ago

Do you mean the name? We refer to it as advertising pretty openly. That's what it is.

marksands07• 13 years ago

Have you seen Twitter's "Sponsored Tweets", Facebook's "Sponsored Stories", Amazon's "Inspired by your browsing history". Ditching the word "advertising" is nothing new and we all use sites like these every day.

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

Tell me when I enabled that setting, and explain why you make it seem as if I recommend certain products and services.

On another note do you realize that you make it seem as if I endorse stealth advertising?

Please quit the marketing speak, it makes me itchy.

And I have opted out, as the blog post details.

danielha4• 13 years ago

What marketing speak? This is how I talk and I'm an awful marketer.

MatthewPhillips3• 13 years ago

Hi Daniel, why was it not opt-in? You describe it as a "revenue sharing" program, but did not ask your customers if they wanted to be part of it. You assumed their silence meant that they did.

kamjam3• 13 years ago

Because that's how most options that are likely to make money are rolled out these days. Disqus are not the only one using these tactics.

I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will know the one I am talking about. But it's things like pre-selecting paid for delivery options, adding travel insurance to flight cost etc etc to drive up costs but then make it not obvious how to remove those items... kind of reminds me of those tactics.

Most of the things rolled out in Facebook I found out through HN or other friends posting. It's not always obvious (though in this case it looks like everyone else got he email except the OP)

benatkin2• 13 years ago

Crickets.

gtaylor• 13 years ago

As a Disqus user, I did receive notification of this and did disable the new "Promoted Discovery" feature. I don't take issue with anything you have just said, except for the part where you call it "Promoted Discovery" instead of advertising.

Let's be real and call it what it is. I think that in this case, the "Promoted Discovery" term is confusing enough to where some users would think that the "Recommended" content really was selected by the content author. Jacques is irate at this, and rightly so. He did not pick the content, and it would appear to some users that he is endorsing things that he isn't.

That's all fun and games until something offensive or politically incorrect gets "Recommended"...

qu4z-24• 13 years ago

Or something Jacques disagrees with. It needn't be generally offensive or politically incorrect.

ahoyhere• 13 years ago

"We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery)."

This sentence is a microcosm of exactly what's going on. This is not a sentence a normal person would write, nor would a normal person read it and understand.

The excerpts from the "notice" sent out, found above, tell the rest of the story.

When people use weaselly phrasing like "being communicative around what we're doing" and emails with innocuous and deadly boring subject lines like "Growing with Disqus" with surprise-now-you're-advertising-for-us bombs inside, what conclusion can we draw?

Looks like deliberate obfuscation to me.

And as Douglas Adams wrote, "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."

homosaur• 13 years ago

All I can say to Disqus is a big "fuck you" and I will never be back. At least try to sell me something. Right now, it's either whore out my blog to your advertisers or pay $999 for VIP service. The first rule of making a product is to actually sell something. I'd pay $10 or $20 a month to keep the whoring off my blog but there's no option for that.

Good day sir.

thedufer• 13 years ago

I think the most concerning part of this is hiding it from site owners when they're logged in. This feels like an admission that what you're doing is wrong, and that it needs to be hidden from the people who can turn it off. How did you come to that particular decision?

mikecane• 13 years ago

>>>I think the most concerning part of this is hiding it from site owners when they're logged in.

I use the free WordPress.com. They don't show me the ads they place on my site if I'm logged in.

rapind• 13 years ago

Is it safe to assume that if I'm a paying customer I don't have to worry about ads / promoted discovery showing up on my site, or is it on (opt-out) by default?

tripzilch3• 13 years ago

You forget to address (or clear up) the part where you make it seem as if the author of the blog endorses/recommends your advertising links. Because doing that without explicit consent is wrong. Nor does an announcement "unless you stop us, we're going to use your voice to endorse our advertisers' links" make it right.

The latter is almost funny to consider, except for the bit where it actually happened.

(btw I did upvote you because I think it's important to not sink Disqus' reply)

lurker142• 13 years ago

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

Option (a) is Annoying, unpleasant, and bordering on astroturfing, but understandable

Option (b) is sad.

callahad3• 13 years ago

116 comments and not one mention of the substrings "ethic" or "moral".

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.

bcoates2• 13 years ago

This might have negative consequences for people running personal websites:

"Bloggers -- You Might Have Already Had Libel Insurance, but you might have lost it by having ads or a tipjar.":

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1185312054.shtml

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.

j45• 13 years ago

Nothing is free.

If it's free you, or the attention you provide / facilitate is the product.

glfomfn• 13 years ago

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.

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.

rinon• 13 years ago

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).

EGF• 13 years ago

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)

jacquesm27• 13 years ago

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.

electic• 13 years ago

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.

aaronz8• 13 years ago

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

cyberpanther• 13 years ago

Just turn off the feature and stop whining.

AJ007• 13 years ago

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.

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.

fakeer• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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

sehe3• 13 years ago

I can't say I'm impressed here.

In the process of being all self righteous and morally outraged, you have killed the comments contributed by your audience.

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.

I noticed I wasn't really the first person to actively bump 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.

Here is the gist of the comment (I can't reproduce the version anymore, since you ... destroyed it):

> http://jacquesmattheij.com/when-haskell-is-not-faster-than-c...

===================

Hmm. I might be missing something.

But I too read that article you linked, and decided to whip up something in C++. Here's what I wrote, largely unoptimized: https://gist.github.com/4590998#file-cpp-version-cpp

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)

sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./cpp-version < input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 0m2.187s

sehe@desktop:/tmp/4590998$ time ./c-version < input | md5sum 33ad35318cfcdc0b675f33633b26445b - real 1m30.358s

(the md5sum is just there to verify that the results are identical)

===================

sehe3• 13 years ago

O hey, just found the heap profiling runs.

As you can see, the C++ version uses much less memory (also the C version by the OP uses 73MB - whoa; The OCaml#3 might report 12MB, but the C++ version clocks in at just 12KB. I'm guessing he C++ version would use the same order of magnitude as the OCaml#3 on comparable input sets, though)

    Command:            ./c-version
    Massif arguments:   (none)
    ms_print arguments: massif.out.18434
    
        MB
    73.22^#                                                                       
         |#                                                                       
         |#                                                                       
         |#                                                                       
         |#                                                                       
         |#                                                           :           
         |#                                                           :           
         |#:::::::::::::                                              :           
         |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@::                             :           
         |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::::@:::@::::              :           
         |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::   :           
         |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::::@::::::      
         |#: :::::::::::::@::::@::::::@:::@::: @:::@::::::::::@::::::@::::::@:::: 
       0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------->Gi
         0                                                                   16.24
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Command:            ./cpp-version
    Massif arguments:   (none)
    ms_print arguments: massif.out.18391
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
        KB
    12.15^@                                                                       
         |#:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
         |#                                                                      :
       0 +----------------------------------------------------------------------->Gi
         0                                                                   11.17

sehe3• 13 years ago

Ah well. It looks like I'm just invisible to you then. Sorry for bothering.

Good luck with the blog

Disqus bait and switch, now with ads

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