no, they do not

There’s not a simple answer — there are a variety of models for a commenting UX and I think the game-changing innovation is probably still out there. A lot of the answer depends on the nature of the underlying content and comments. Active daily engagement of the community here on AVC looks pretty different than product reviews on Amazon or Q&A on Quora or Stack Overflow. It’s ugly as sin, but Slashdot does some things pretty right. Most important — there are some good models out there, what’s needed is a bit of study and application to figure out what best facilitates the kind of behavior (thoughtful engagement) you’re trying to encourage in the context of a particular size and scope of audience. Rather than one size fits all, you could imagine evolving a couple options depending on the needs of the site where Disqus is embedded.As a big believer in form informing function, I think the ideal solution likely has some strong visual components. For example, today’s Disqus uses the indent level of comments to indicate relatedness. That’s a good start — better than if all comments were indented to the same level — but could be dramatically enhanced by some simple visuals and tools, such as a longer/bolder horizontal line that separates top-level comments and groups their follow-ups, and folding — buttons that show/hide the tree, remember what I folded on my prior visit, and only reveal comments that are “new” in the interim.monty

Please do! I’d love to get their attention on these issues.

It is hard to say how they need a redesign. I think the email format helps somewhat, but not enough. A lot of this has to do with linearity of discussions: Comments and related discussion technology is not a linear process. Time is disrupted during the actual conversation. They stop, start, restart. Ect.

Do you care if I forward this to the people at disqus. I think your critiques are genuine, and are worth hearing about handling UX

This comment is a perfect example of some of the barriers that Disqus needlessly throws up to engagement.1. I never would have seen it but for the email I just found in my inbox (arrived 2:39pm – 3 hours ago) for a comment that was posted 8 hours ago.2. I clicked the “Link to comment” link in the Disqus email, and sure enough it opened this page in Chrome. But, didn’t take me to this post, it took me somewhere else in the discussion.3. I hit CMD-F and searched for “Brandon” in Chrome’s “find on page” function. Chrome dutifully tells me that “brandon” occurs 18 times, and has little arrows that supposedly let me step between the matches.4. Unfortunately, while I can step through the matches, Disqus’s html-foo prevents Chrome from actually scrolling to those matches. Useless!5. So I have to resort to logic to try to find where Brandon’s comment might have appeared. It’s there, wedged between Shana’s comment of 12 hours ago, and my comment of 10 hours ago.6. Nearly 5 minutes later, I’ve found the comment and can add this one.7. Most interesting, here is what I am *feeling*: that there’s not a lot of value in spending the time to write a thoughtful response, because Brandon / shana / fred / rest of community is not likely to see it in a timely manner, or at all.I suspect that these issues aren’t good for AVC community, or for Disqus in terms of adoption & growth. (That said: I would LOVE to hear a counterargument!) No inside knowledge but my suspicion is that this is the kind of UX that makes tremendous sense from a coding (web design + data structures) standpoint but not a customer-centric interaction design standpoint.That’s easy to say, but I’ll back it up with an offer. Hey Disqus guys! I’m close to lining up my Next Big Thing, and care enough about this community and its potential to waive my $2k day rate if you want some interim help (market research, PoI analysis) to get the product roadmap aligned with user needs. You have a fantastic community here of passionate & smart users, it would be trivial to set up a sandbox with some or all AVC users where Disqus could iterate quickly and deliver a direct measurable impact on engagement and adoption. (LMK, mkosma @ gmail)

Was about to make the same comment. I read everything you post, but almost always through RSs