Wow, this actually looks like something better than either old disqus or fb comments. I'm tempted to finally get around to setting up a blog again to try it out. (I had kind of given up on the idea of a blog comment network once disqus semi-stagnated, and fb comments became more common).

I'm amazed at how much worthwhile comment (albeit with a horrible SNR) is still trapped in phpBB forum sites, blog comments, and other basically painful to access places. Within startups and technology, generally quora or hn or stack overflow or blogs themselves seem adequate, but whenever I search for info about my car, firearms, legal, DIY, etc., it feels like a bad version of 2003.

There's still no good solution to the "local newspaper comment quality problem", though.

Disqus has never gotten enough credit for their design. People forget how crappy comments used to look. When Disqus came out, everyone eventually copied their design. With Disqus 2012, I think that's going to happen again. They are leading the way.

My biggest annoyance with Disqus is that you can't tell in advance what requirements it will make in terms of signing in. Some sites have openid and some don't, some are okay with anonymous comments and some aren't. Usually you have to type some junk, hit post and then find out what you'll be allowed to use and give up, or comment as appropriate. Sometimes I forget, write an insightful comment and then find I can't actually post it.

The new changes look excellent and i'm excited to roll them out on our site. Unfortunately, however great it is won't stop us from planning to migrate away from disqus and on to a custom-built system.

The simple reason is the prohibitive pricing for pro features. Down the road we will need control over authentication, so that we can roll in more interactivity on our website (premium content, interactive and community features).

Disqus offers this feature for pro users, but at $300/month its just not feasible. As a media site that hopes for small 4-figure revenue monthly, $300 is just way outside our budget for a third-party service like this. It would need to be more like $30/m to be in the ballpark really.

I guess we aren't the people they are targeting, but i hope Disqus considers a much lower tier with single sign-on and without some of the other pro features (we aren't interested in analytics, can live without realtime, theme editor, priority support). I wonder how many other "pro-bloggers" and "small businesses" (2 things listed under 'who is this for') are alienated with the high pricing.

If you want to play around with this live, I noticed it's been running on AVC for a week or so: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/05/twitter-brings-you-closer.ht...

Quite honestly, I was skeptical about these changes upon first looking at the Community tab in the screenshot. Then I scrolled down to the end of the post, where you can actually see the new comment system in action. It does indeed seem like a significant improvement, including the new Community tab. In a day and age when it seems a lot of companies make UI changes that are actually a step backward, bravo to Disqus for the enhancements. Well done!

I didn't see a link, but I'd be interested to know if and how the integration changes for sites implementing the new Disqus.

In any case, looks really good!

If you are interested in how we do the realertime notifications stay tuned for a blog post (and talk at EuroPython). Hint it isn't node.js.

Does it support SSL yet? Last I checked (admittedly, about 6 months ago), it seemed Disqus could not be used at full-SSL sites.

The video mentions that they use a technique to include comments that provides proper SEO (and feels natural to Google). Any information on what they've done? I remember previously, they had a WordPress plugin that brought Disqus comments back to your site for SEO purposes.

I love Disqus. They are one of the few startups building seemingly unsexy but solid fundamental tech.

I just hope they have a solid business and don't get bought by BigCo for talent or fear of competition.

Nice, now all the racist crap at the bottom of Drudge-linked articles will look like YouTube comments instead of Yahoo! comments.

Is Disqus more friendly to screen readers / impaired users? In the past its reliance on Javascript has made it painful for accessibility software, but the SEO improvements might have made things nicer now. This is the big objection to deploying Disqus on our site.

Will it remove the unnecessary scare-warning about third party cookies?

Finally, collapsible comment threads! awesome.

Now, only HN needs to fall in line and all comment-thread-hijacking problems will be gone!

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looks pretty good - I am of the belief that anonymous comment posting should not have a place on the internet simple because of the poor quality of conversation it leads to. Would have been nice if they had innovated in this desperately need area of real IDs for comments. Image all the shitty comments that will disappear when people have to back them with real name id.