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The Disqus website commenting system is no longer free, (as in beer).
When it comes to managing comments on a website, the free options include WordPress (and other native comment systems), Facebook comments, and [until recently] Livefyre (now owned by Adobe).
You also used to be able to use Disqus for free, but that changed this past week when the company started telling websites that use Disqus that they had to either sign up for the paid service or turn on the Disqus ads.
[...] Disqus offered clear benefits over the default WordPress comment system, including support for threaded comments, upvotes, spam detection (which clearly doesn't always work), comment moderation tools.
At the time Disqus was also completely free for most publishers. Over the years Disqus has rolled out a few different monetization options. Larger publishers can pay for premium features, and all sites can opt-in to Disqus ads, which can appear above or in the middle of the comments sections.
Starting later this week, all publishers using Disqus will have to either enable ads or pay for a subscription.
I honestly don't know which would be worse: advertisements, or websites currently using Disqus switching to Facebook comments.
Also at Liliputing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Friday January 27 2017, @02:06PM
I disagree with your specific point. They have the absolute right to put whatever they want on their web sites; and we have the absolute right not to visit those sites. That's the way it works.
They have no obligation; but if they don't share information, then that will have consequences on the number and type of visitors.
However, I agree with the wider issue, which is that no-one can force ads on anyone else. The best they can do is to make sites that people want to visit despite the ads.
And of course some of us have a much lower tolerance for ads than others. Mine leads me to use an ad-blocker, a script blocker, and a massive hosts file; for me ads are a waste of attention, of bandwidth, of CPU load, of screen space, and a malware risk. (They're also a perverse incentive; I want to encourage goods and services that do what I want, well, not ones that advertise widely.)
I hate ads and trackers, and avoid that sort of site. I'd be very happy to see lots of moral and commercial pressure to avoid them. But I'm not sure I'd want to see legal pressure in general: things like fraud, misrepresentation, and hacking are already covered, and I think we need some more control over personal data; but much as I hate advertising in general, I suspect an outright ban would have too many unintended side-effects.
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