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Disqus also has been criticized for not giving users control over who follows them. Any user can follow any other user, but a user being followed cannot control or block who is following them.<ref>[http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/708520-following-other-users "How do I block people from following me?"] Disqus Help Pages Retrieved June 14, 2013</ref> This allows the system to easily be misused for harassment purposes.
Disqus also has been criticized for not giving users control over who follows them. Any user can follow any other user, but a user being followed cannot control or block who is following them.<ref>[http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/708520-following-other-users "How do I block people from following me?"] Disqus Help Pages Retrieved June 14, 2013</ref> This allows the system to easily be misused for harassment purposes.


With all of the above complaints taken into account, Disqus appears to be a conspiracy to remove anonymity from the web and ultimately censor dissent.{{Citation needed|date=July 2013}} Users have reported being targeted with censorship with Disqus even identifying new accounts with existed users for targeting.{{Citation needed|date=July 2013}}
With all of the above complaints taken into account, Disqus appears to be a conspiracy to remove anonymity from the web and ultimately censor dissent.{{Citation needed|date=July 2013}} Users have reported being targeted with censorship with Disqus even identifying brand new accounts with existing users for instant censoring.{{Citation needed|date=July 2013}}


==References==
==References==

Revision as of 14:24, 13 August 2013

Disqus
Disqus text logo
Type of businessPrivate
Available inMultilingual
FoundedSan Francisco, California (October 30, 2007 (2007-10-30))
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s)Daniel Ha
Jason Yan
Key peopleDaniel Ha (CEO)
Jason Yan (CTO)
IndustryInternet
Employees33 (2012)
URLdisqus.com
RegistrationOptional
Users50 million
LaunchedOctober 2007
Current statusActive

Disqus (/dï-sküs/) is an online discussion and commenting service for websites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

Disqus ranks #1 in Quantcast's U.S. networks with 144 million monthly unique U.S. visits[2] Disqus is featured on many major publications, such as CNN, Daily Telegraph and IGN and about 750,000 blogs and websites.[3] It competes with IntenseDebate, Livefyre and Echo.

History

Disqus was first developed in the summer of 2007 as a Y Combinator startup headed by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan, both of whom were undergraduates at University of California, Davis. Disqus was first incorporated and launched on October 30, 2007.

Financing

In early 2011, Disqus raised $10 million in funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Venture Partners.[4]

Growth

In November 2010, shortly after celebrating its third anniversary, Disqus announced hitting 200 million unique visitors/month. Seven months later in May 2011, Disqus announced approaching 500 million unique visitors/month, in addition to consistent 500% traffic, user, and community growth for the previous year, bringing its total counts to about 750,000 websites and 50 million registered users[3][5]

According to a March 2011 study by Lijit, Disqus is used by 75% of websites who use a third party commenting or discussion system.[6]

Technology

The Disqus comment widget is written in JavaScript and is powered by a back end primarily written in Django.

Business model

Disqus operates on the freemium financial model, similar to Dropbox and Evernote. The service is free to use for both commenters and websites.

Starting in November 2010 Disqus began officially offering three add-on packages for websites: Plus for $19/month, Pro for $199/month, and VIP starting at $999/month.[7] In mid-2011, the Plus package was removed and Pro was increased to $299/month.

Starting July 2012, Disqus offers just two premium packages, the VIP package and a Single sign on-only package[clarification needed] for $99/month.

Functionality

Language support

Both the Disqus website and comment system were translated into more than 60 languages in 2011.[8] With the introduction of the new Disqus in 2012, language support dropped to 7 languages[9] and even though Disqus accept applications for new languages,[10] only one such has been added since bringing the current number of supported languages to 8 as of 2013.

Browser support

Disqus works in all major web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. However, there have been reports of issues with Opera 12.12. On mobile devices, Disqus currently only supports browsers using the WebKit layout engine.[11]

Criticism and privacy concerns

Some commentators have noted the privacy issues inherent in the use of services like Disqus, which serve their content through third party JavaScript widgets.[12][13][14]

As with other embedded web widgets such as like buttons, the Disqus widget acts as a web bug which tracks a users activities, even when they are not logged in, across different sites that use the Disqus commenting system. Information tracked by Disqus.com, which may be disclosed to 3rd parties, includes pseudonymous analytics data such as a users IP address, their web-browser's version and installed add-ons, and their referring pages and exit links.[15] Although this data is referred to by Disqus as "Non-Personally Identifiable Information", such data, when aggregated, has been shown to be usable for de-anonymizing users.[13]

Users wishing to avoid these issues may opt to install a privacy-enhancing web browser extension, such as Ghostery, NoScript, or DoNotTrackPlus, which identify widgets such as Disqus as web-bugs,[16][17] and allows them to be blocked; this renders Disqus-powered commenting sections unviewable.

Disqus has also been criticized for publishing its registered users' entire commenting histories, along with a list of connected blogs and services, on the publicly viewable user profile pages.[18]

Disqus also has been criticized for not giving users control over who follows them. Any user can follow any other user, but a user being followed cannot control or block who is following them.[19] This allows the system to easily be misused for harassment purposes.

With all of the above complaints taken into account, Disqus appears to be a conspiracy to remove anonymity from the web and ultimately censor dissent.[citation needed] Users have reported being targeted with censorship with Disqus even identifying brand new accounts with existing users for instant censoring.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ "Disqus.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2013-04-22.
  2. ^ "Disqus Network Traffic and Demographic Statistics by Quantcast". Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  3. ^ a b "The Numbers of Disqus". May 4, 2011. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  4. ^ "Commenting startups Disqus celebrates its birthday with $10M more". May 4, 2011. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  5. ^ "PyCon 2011 Scaling Disqus". March 13, 2011. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  6. ^ "Lijit Study Shows Publisher Adoption of Social Media Tools Grows 80%". March 2, 2011. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  7. ^ "The new DISQUS: Add-ons, Analytics, APIs, and more". Disqus Product Blog. November 17, 2010. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  8. ^ "Disqus Comments: Translated in over 40 languages". November 2, 2009. Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  9. ^ "What’s New for the New Disqus". November 8, 2012. Retrieved January 23, 2013.
  10. ^ "What languages does Disqus support?". Retrieved January 23, 2013.
  11. ^ "Which mobile devices does Disqus work with?". Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  12. ^ "#5667 (Is DISQUS a solution for spam-free comments?) – Support" Retrieved October 18, 2011.
  13. ^ a b "There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking" Center for Internet and Society. July 28, 2011. Retrieved June 10, 2012
  14. ^ "Disqus Spies On You!" June 8, 2011. Retrieved June 10, 2012
  15. ^ "Privacy Policy" Disqus.com Retrieved June 10, 2012
  16. ^ "Disqus — Analysis by Ghostery" Retrieved June 10, 2012
  17. ^ [1] Retrieved July 1, 2012
  18. ^ "The First Rule of Privacy" Thomas Baekdal February 25, 2010. Retrieved June 10, 2012
  19. ^ "How do I block people from following me?" Disqus Help Pages Retrieved June 14, 2013
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