Thursday August 2, 2018; 10:15 AM EDT
I really dislike complaining about free services. If you hate a service, my philosophy goes, just opt out. I've been on the other side of this, struggling to provide a free service to users who acted like they were paying huge money, long before there was any monetization of free services. I never want to be one of those people. #- But sometimes a service is very hard to opt out of, and they take advantage of that, by changing the service from tolerable to obscene. Disqus is now doing that, and it will be hard and/or painful, maybe impossible, for me to opt out.#
- Here's an example of one of the pages. And a screen shot. #
- I've used Disqus for comments for many years, probably a decade, maybe more. I included their code in my pages, so users could comment on posts. I've even built support for products on Disqus. Some pages have a lot of comments with valuable information. Just turning off Disqus, a brute force way of opting out, would also remove those comments. And turning off Disqus is hard to do because I don't control the HTTP servers that host most of my content, and changing the HTML pages themselves is a sizeable task (understatement).#
- How we got here. The old Disqus was fairly innocuous. Of course they spied on the users, and then a few years ago they started including ads, but they were small and out of the way. Now the ads are huge, and getting bigger. They're more prominent than the comments. It's as if I were running ads on my sites, and the comments were clickbait to get you to look at the ads, like so many sites these days. Their ads make me look bad.#
- Of course I don't run ads on my pages. It's never been worth it to me. Those are their ads, paying them money, on my pages. They're changing the deal on pages that were published a long time ago, and are there just to maintain a record.#
- I could probably turn off the display for most of them without modifying any content, using CSS. I now wish I had a central set of styles every page included, but I wasn't so wise as to foresee the need. I have a conundrum. Every time I look at one of the pages with those huge ads on them, I think what a problem, I need to fix this, now.#
- And then I remember how impossible it is.#
- First step in fixing it, I guess, is documenting the problem. Done.#
