New Disqus

I noticed that Disqus has revamped the look and functionality of their commenting system.

Note the prominent capability to share a comment on Twitter, as well as the ability to subscribe to a comment thread by email or RSS, and a trackback URL. The last is interesting since Tumblr doesn’t support the trackback protocol.

The tweet that Disques generates is fairly standard, and it did pull Jevon’s Twitter handle out of his profile, which is quite helpful:

I wonder if Disqus is planning to do something like their own social network? It may seeema bit disjoint, but it might be interesting to see the stream of comments from someone you admire, so long as Disqus set context in some way. It would certainly be interesting to see what Flipboard might do with information like that.

I learned that Disqus is rolling out a new Use Ranks functionality, too. I’ll have to look into that more deeply.

Disqus Raises $10 Million, Doubles in Size Despite Facebook Comments - Mike Melanson

Melanson runs down the numbers:

Disqus, which this week celebrates four years of existence, raised the $10 million with North Bridge and Union Square Ventures. In its blog post today, the company said that it’s all about the numbers. But what are those numbers?

Disqus says that it reaches nearly 500 million unique visitors per month across the 750,000 websites using its commenting system. Over the last year, that’s an increase of 500%, with much of that growth in recent months. As a matter of fact, the company says it was at only 200 million uniques per month last November, meaning it has more than doubled unique visitors in six months. The post also mentions a recent study by Lijit, which it says that Disqus is used by 75% of websites that use a third-party commenting system.

Doesn’t mention Tumblr: how much of the growth is Tumblr-related? Tumblr should acquire and integrate, but David Karp, Tumblr’s founder is deeply ambivalent about comments.

Reuters New Approach To Comments

I think the Reuters’ approach is very smart:

Dean Wright, Toward a more thoughtful conversation on stories

Until recently, our [comment] moderation process involved editors going through a basket of all incoming comments, publishing the ones that met our standards and blocking the others. (It’s a binary decision: we don’t have the resources to edit comments.)

This was unsatisfactory because it delayed the publication of good comments, especially overnight and at weekends when our staffing is lighter.

Our new process grants a kind of VIP status on people who have had comments approved previously. When you register to comment on Reuters.com, our moderation software tags you as a new user. Your comments go through the same moderation process as before, but every time we approve a comment, you score a point.

Once you’ve reached a certain number of points, you become a recognized user. Congratulations: your comments will be published instantly from now on. Our editors will still review your comments after they’ve been published and will remove them if they don’t meet our standards. When that happens, you’ll lose points. Lose enough points and you’ll revert to new user status.

The highest scoring commentators will be classified as expert users, earning additional privileges that we’ll implement in future. You can see approval statistics for each reader on public profile pages like this, accessed by clicking on the name next to a comment.

It’s not a perfect system, but we believe it’s a foundation for facilitating a civil and rewarding discussion that’s open to the widest range of people. Let me know what you think.

So, newbies get moderated, gaining points until they cross a threshold into being regulars who are not moderated. But regulars can lose points by breaking the groundrules, and can fall back into always being moderated. And lastly, regulars who make a real contribution can gain enough points to be considered experts, which will lead to more rights.

Basically a meritocratic system, and one that should be widely emulated.

Can’t this logic be built into systems like Disqus, for example?

Back To Disqus Comments

Okay. I give.

Giving Up On Disqus Comments

I keep expecting that Tumblr will announce their own take on comments (ministreams? A better version of Notes?) but they haven’t as of yet.

But the Disqus comment system just doesn’t gibe well with Tumblr, or my increasingly Twitter-oriented world. And the Disqus ‘Reactions’ — an implementation of BackType’s Twitter monitoring technology — seemed to stop working this week. So I have modified this template to drop the Disqus comments, and I have included a Tweetmeme button on each post, instead.

Here you see two posts, one with no Tweets referring to it, and the other with one. In either case, clicking on ‘tweet’ will allow you to create a tweet with a URL pointing to the post.

In the case of posts with existing tweets pointing at them, clicking on the number — ‘12 tweets’ — will open a Tweetmeme window displaying those tweets.

So, I am adopting this mechanism in lieu of external comments. At least the Twitter stream is a living breathing place, while the comment threads on blogs feel like an old cobwebby library.

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Update: Saturday 11 September 2010

I was tweeted by @golda from BackType who suggested that a BackType button might be simpler that the sort of noisy and ad-busy Tweetmeme result.

Another reason to switch to Backtype from Tweetmeme is that BackType will show results going back as far as the post was original created. Although there seems to be an issue in my case, perhaps due to the domain name change I went through at the start of the summer. So I will try this for a while and see.

Disqus Analytics Will Give Us More Insight Into Our Audience - MG Siegler

There are nearly 150 million people around the world now that use Disqus on a monthly basis.

Siegler profiles Disqus’ new analytics features. I will have to take a look.

Disqus Releases ‘Likes’

This morning I noticed this on my site:

From the Disqus blog:

(Re)Introducing Community Likes

This feature continues Disqus’ goal to help pull a true community out of the audience that visits your site. Liking comments has been a core piece of Disqus since the beginning, and we’re now extending this feedback mechanism to the top-level page or article itself. Community Likes is an easy, quick way for your visitors to give feedback and make their presence known on your site, all without having to post an actual comment.

Community Likes also functions as a slick way for people to share the article on Facebook and Twitter (only if they give it a thumbs up — but don’t worry, we’ve been seeing over 90% likes over dislikes). That means that liking content with Disqus’ buttons taps into the power of both Facebook’s and Twitter’s social networks.

Hmmm. Aside from the fact that I think blogs and websites can have ‘true community’ without Disqus comments, I like the idea of what they are up to, especially for blogs and websites that are a bit short on social gestures.

But for me, and others that are using Tumblr and other platforms that already have a ‘likes’ capability, we are going to have a clash of social engagement. Should a visitor to this post use the Tumblr ‘like’ or the Disqus ‘like’? Or both? Is there some way for a blog publisher to collate these together?

This is perhaps (yet another) situation where you have wonder Tumblr doesn’t implement its own integrated commenting solution. It is inviting this sort of confusion, or worse, watching the rich social integration of Tumblr getting diluted by third party commenting plug-ins, like Disqus or JS-Kit.

I am going to watch and see what happens, but I am sure confusion is going to ensue. Disqus offers publishers the means to disable these features, which is my first instinct, I confess.

What do you think? Which would you use?