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Disqus Relaunches Website With a Social Focus

Faced with increased competition from Livefyre and (especially) Facebook, Disqus relaunched its home page today as a meta-social network. Gone is the quiet landing page which pitched the service to visitors; in its place you’ll find a busy-looking page which looks more like Google Plus than a comment service:

disqus management

To be honest, folks, I’m not that familiar with Disqus, so I’ll just quote what The Verge says has changed:

You’ll also see the latest comments on your own site, if you have one, and recommendations for other commenters to follow. And for the first time, Disqus is creating standalone forums that are separate from article pages.

The service’s new news feed shows you recent comments on your own blog, if you have one, and recommendations for other commenters to follow. Like most social networks, it notifies you when someone replies to you, up-votes your comments, or invites you to a discussion.

But the most interesting thing here is in its standalone forums, which represent the first time Disqus has hosted discussions away from its core widget. The first two forums are for fashion and movies; you can join any of the discussions there or create your own.

This looks like an odd move for a comment platform, but it’s an understandable one.

More and more discussion is taking place on TW/FB and not in comment sections, so it would make sense that Disqus would expand into a social platform as well. And when you get down to it, Disqus already was most of a social network- just one that only consisted of a backend which supported socializing on other sites.

P.S. Speaking of social networks and comment sections, I’ve been thinking of adding Facebook comments as a second option to WP comments (but not a replacement). Would anyone find that useful?

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Comments


Paul March 4, 2015 um 2:21 pm

In answer to the Facebook part. No, mainly for security reasons.

Nate Hoffelder March 4, 2015 um 3:07 pm

Okay. I wasn’t really into the idea either.


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