Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Disqus censored me :-(

I love Disqus, but I left a comment on their post about 973 Disqus commenters and they removed it.  Thankfully, it's still in my profile, so I figured I'd post it here because I like the idea so much:

AI has gotten very good at finding "similar input" and I would like to see Disqus provide commenters with a way to "Fit your comment into 25 words or less for our AI matcher to see if we can 'automagically' strengthen your input with that of others, and lead you all to others who have similar input." It would be helpful all around to see automation recognize and point out to a publisher (and their audience) when they do something especially good or bad.
For example, for this comment, I'd write "Use comment similarity to highlight shared sentiment and connect those who share it."
I believe that some sites do not show comments by default, but require the user to click to view them. I think this is a dirty trick used by publishers who realize that comments destroy the power of their propaganda. It would be nice to see some research into whether there is any correlation between showing comments by default and reader satisfaction with various aspects of what a publisher does.
For this second part of my comment, my 25-words-or-less version is: "Research correlation between reader satisfaction and requiring a click to see comments."
Since they removed it from the article, I copied it and sent it to Automattic, the makers of wordpress plugins IntenseDebate and Akismet among others.