Removing Disqus
Disqus recently sent me an email, warning that (thank you) they will soon enable ads in my site’s comment sections (no thank you).
Comments are going away for now, because I’m not going to pay for ad-free Disqus. You can still get in touch via email (see the site footer).
I’ve also exported all the comments from Disqus so that I can restore them if I ever build a comment system.
Disqus hosted this site’s comments for 10 years, and I never paid them a cent. I wonder how many other people did this too? It seems like a bad business strategy; the free version was good enough, so why would anyone pay for it? They’d inevitably have to stop giving out free lunches.
But suppose it weren’t a bad strategy, because somehow the freeloading blogs were indirectly helpful in achieving profitability. What does that say about Disqus’ current direction? Their profit might be decreasing, meaning that paying users are no longer enough to subsidise the freeloaders. But if their profit is not decreasing, then they’re being greedy and trying to extract more from their current users.