DISQUS

i don't moderate comments at AVC in the traditional sense

i accept them all and never delete them unless they are comment spam or hate speech

but i do engage heavily in the comments (as does techcrunch) and we've done a pretty good job of keeping the trolls out

they show up occasionally but they are not welcome

it also helps to have a bouncer. i started with my brother (aka jackson) and now its kid mercury.

he's awesome

fred

is there anywhere that accomodates the vegan art director?

so cute!

disqus has completely changed the experience on AVC, for me, but also for the people who comment.


it's a big deal that not many people truly appreciate



clearly you do and that's great to see

disqus has completely changed the experience on AVC, for me, but also for the people who comment.


it's a big deal that not many people truly appreciate



clearly you do and that's great to see

this is such a great read on so many levels. i got involved around the time this story ends so i've always wondered about those early days.

the story about sitting on top of the slide in south park is now etched in my brain as the place twitter was concieved.

thanks for that.

i am sure you are right robert that there is a great team assembled who can keep the magic alive, but it's really hard to replace the intensity that founder brings. look at Microsoft without Gates at the helm, for example.

but what really bothers me is the misinformation that Jobs and Apple have been supplying the market about his health.

i sold all my apple a week ago, and blogged about that decision before i executed the trade. this is what I said:

"The story on Apple is Jobs and his health. There were eight of us in all at dinner and not one of us, I mean nobody, that believed Jobs is healthy. And none of us believed the Apple's PR team is being straight on this issue. As good as the company is, I just can't own a stock when I don't believe the company is being straight with investors. So I am selling my entire position in Apple this morning including the stock I bought earlier than last fall."

trust is my single most important factor in evaluating a company and its management team and i can't trust Jobs and the Apple PR/IR team anymore.

i can understand why Jobs feels his health is nobody's business and i feel terribly for him, but it doesn't change my view that he's broken the trust of his shareholders and that's a very bad thing to do.

fred

robert,

i used disqus, and liked it so much that we invested in the company.

there are other third party comment systems and most of them are mentioned here

think of a third party comment systems as a "blog for your commenters"

they gain status from commenting and their comments gain weight as others like them and rate them

i also use disqus' reblog feature to highlight the best comments i get right on the front page of my blog.

bottom line is that comments don't suck if you invest in them, treat them as real content, and put them in a system that allows them to thrive

fred

@mark - thanks, i've got it bookmarked and will visit regularly now

another reason why friendfeed is so good. is there a page of the most liked posts on friendfeed? like delicious popular?

robert,

my tumblog is at fredwilson.vc so you can follow me there

do you have a tumblog and if so, what is the url?

thanks

fred

totally agree robert

the minute i saw those engagement points, i was super psyched

i think its a big innovation that's going to be good for users and google

good discussion. i love blogs where the comments are as good as the posts. every business needs to evolve and change and i think the VC business is working on doing just that. at least we aren't as broken as banks/brokerage/autos/insurance/airlines/etc/etc

i think my twitter quote says most everything that I feel about this post. it's true that many "web 2.0" services have yet to go mainstream. but if i thought they never would, i would not have invested in twitter or any other of the services we've invested in.

that's not to say i think they all will go mainstream, venture capital is not about hitting every pitch, but i think enough of them will that we'll make good money investing in this sector.

It takes time, good management, and evolving business strategies and revenue models to make these ideas turn into real businesses.

fast company tv seems to be down right now.

i'll check in again later. this sounds like a great interview and i am quite interested in it.

Robert

I don't think anyone wants FriendFeed to be Twitter 2.0

We want FriendFeed to be the best social media aggregation system. Which it already is.

I think we all win (the users) if the best of breed services keep getting better at the one thing they do better than anyone else.

Fred

robert,

i've had all my activity on FF since the very start and I've tried to use it to follow other people but it doesn't work for me for the follow part. I realize that it works well for others and I am really rooting for FF to succeed. I've noticed that their traffic was down in April and I think that may be because it's just too much to wade through for most people. I don't use a feed reader either as hard as I've tried.

One thing I'd really like them to do for me, the producer of content in their system, is give me many options other than visiting FF to get the interactions (favoriting and commenting) that goes on in their system.

Fred

i do think there's a market for both. when a bunch of etsy sellers want to create the etsy social network, they'll do it on ning, as they have already done.

when i want to turn my blog into a social network, which i've done already with mybloglog and disqus, google's friend connect is a better choice.

one thing's for sure, the web is going social super fast and not everyone is using facebook to have great social interactions on the web.

this is super cool

whitney should just publish this script since it's now also working at @shakeshack too

fred

you can blame twitter, friendfeed, shyftr, or whatever service inspires people to comment on our posts, but i'd prefer to thank them for getting people to stop reading for a second and return a thought back to us.

the problem, in my mind, is the platforms we use to publish our blogs don't have an API to spit back these comments/replies/thoughts to us.

when they fix that problem, and the guys at disqus are working on it, we'll be in a better place than we started.

fred

matthew,

i don't think everyone needs to use disqus for the vision i outlined to happen.

i suspect that once everyone sees the power of unlocking comments from the ghetto of blog hosts, that we'll see a lot of innovation and cooperation from all the players including the blog hosts themselves

fred

you sure you don't want to throw your hat in the ring?

nice post

thanks

fred

greg

good question

we means all of us, the consumers who are taking control of the media distribution system.

as for being done, i think that was the wrong word to use. i don't think we'll ever be done.

fred

if there was a time machine, i'd go back to the start at mudcrutch. that's where i want to be.

hey robert - thanks for posting this. i linked to it from my blog at avc.blogs.com

@andrew - the hope is that as volume increases, prices will drop. some of the modules could be sub $10.

fred