David Risley

David, I think you're missing a change in overall attitude towards how content is valued and contextualized. It's no longer about having awesome content and getting people to visit that awesome content in a specific place where it's easy to monetize that visit, but providing awesome content in a shared ecosystem of ideas. As someone who has been part of the internet culture for some time, you know it's never about beating your way of doing things into people, but seeing how people interact and adapting what you do to that. Everything seems to be trending to things like FriendFeed and Twitter and Disqus, I don't think any amount of saying "it's stupid" is going to change that. Get on board, or be marginalized. - Mark Trapp

I have a story for you Risely on the FP of SheGeeks - Corvida

my concern is trust. i've outsourced comments before, only to have the service shut down, losing all the comments. what does disqus do to assure survival of comments, profiles, and threading post-disqus? - Phil Wolff via Alert Thingy

I just answered David over on his blog. Just to prove I can spread the love around. :-) - Robert Scoble

@Phil Don't know, but for Disqus, the bloggers that are supporting it is enough for me. Blame Steven Hodson for starting it all :) - Corvida

I was using YACCS as far back as 2001, and I just found it annoying to have blog up but comments down. The lack of integration just meant one more thing that could go wrong. It's more complicated today, but heck, my del.icio.us cloud locked up one of my pages a few weeks ago and it took a few hours to figure out what service was trashing me. Call me a simpleton, but there's gotta be another way to add more value to the comment content. - Robyn Miller

@Robert - Automattic with its own version of disqus? That'd be cool. - Hutch Carpenter

Mark: You *completely* missed my point. I agree with you, but your "awesome content" means two things: jack and crap - IF the service it is on goes bye-bye. By splitting your internal comments off from your content, you now have two points of failure. And I'm more worried about Disqus than my own web host - who has a solid reputation. - David Risley

David, what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't matter. For the past week, you've stirred the pot a few times on why a group of people is "stupid" for "fractionalizing" the conversation on to things like Disqus and Friendfeed. It's been reading like "Oh, you don't like this excuse? Here's another gotcha!" What I'm saying is, this is where it's going, regardless of how many times you call it dumb or silly or wrong. Get on board or don't. - Mark Trapp

Mark, all you have to do is look at Phil's comment above to see that what I said IS a possibility. Your blog is an asset and I think it is worth thinking about before giving 100% of your comments to another company. You can say "this is where things are going" all you want, but at the end of the day, bills need to be paid and shit happens. It can happen to Disqus, too. Hopefully not. - David Risley

BTW, I'm not comparing Disqus to FriendFeed. These are different animals. - David Risley

Why I'm using Disqus - 1) Threaded comments. 2) User rankings. 3) Comment moderation is better than WordPress. 3) Cuts down on spam significantly. 4) Sidebar widgets that allowed me to remove several plugins, hence speeding up the blog. As for exporting - Disqus exports to an XML file which doesn't have an importation solution but it's close. The pros outweigh the cons in my mind because of less time spent moderating spammy comments. - Jason Kaneshiro

Akismet does a very good job on spam. CenterNetworks ends their post with another good synopsis of my problems with Disqus: http://www.centernetworks.com/.... - David Risley

Believe me, I have much experience moderating spam. I still have Akismet, Spam Karma, a referrer bouncer installed, and still have to daily moderate comments by hand on the posts that do not have disqus installed. I'm tired of spammers and Disqus makes moderation much easier. - Jason Kaneshiro