Why You Should Care About Disqus

15 Apr 2011 . category: . Comments

I use Disqus to run comments on my Tumblr, and I have a slight problem. Disqus is a free alternative commenting system that gives blog authors more ability to moderate comments on their posts, and gives readers more ways to connect with the media. Its big claim to fame is the ability to integrate across multiple networks. Major sites like engadget.com and techcrunch.com use them.

What’s the problem, then? Well, you probably had no idea I was running it.

Back in the days of LiveJournal and Xanga, when Facebook was relegated to Ivy Leaguers, everyone posted everything on a single network. Everything was a blog post, essentially. This was a problem in that a blog post is a rather generic form of expression, but it meant that your friends were all contained in a single network. 

Enter Web 2.0, where it’s not surprising for an individual to have at least 4 or 5 social network accounts. Looking through my own records, I’ve found at least 13 accounts–and that doesn’t include accounts that I’ve forgotten about and/or started before I began keeping records. That’s a lot of different networks.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. Networks like Instragram and foursquare are specialized networks, designed to share specific information with specific people. The problem comes from content getting “stuck” in one place or another. It’s not easy or even possible to move your information across different networks. It’s just not easy to pipe all your discussions into a single place–it’s the downside of such specialization.

Disqus tries to bridge that gap, by promoting interaction around my content across multiple networks. Not only do users have the ability to log in using an existing network, they can continue the discussion on their own network–and I get to see it play out in my blog’s comments. That’s powerful.

The problem comes from a few things. First, it’s not particularly common for people to have blogs like this one, so blogs may not necessarily be the best integration point for all this. Second, this tweet:

The fact of the matter is that in spite of its promises, Disqus still really isn’t as easy to use. I don’t think it’s entirely Disqus’s fault, but incomplete integration with social blogging platforms like Tumblr will continue to be a problem. Of course, all these problems could stem from the fact that I’m not a big site–people just don’t visit this site in the numbers required to make something like Disqus useful to me.

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