Maximum Interaction: Why Publishers Are Turning to Polls to Engage Website Audiences
As a publisher, you're undoubtedly feeling increasing pressure to captivate audiences in a way that both builds your community and generates revenue. You publish great online content, but is that enough to keep your audiences engaged in the modern age of constant distractions and diminished attention spans? Unfortunately, the answer is no. You need to do more, which is why so many publishers have been looking for ways to make their websites more interactive and dynamic.
At Disqus we have the privilege of supporting many of the web’s diverse communities. Today, we wanted to shed some light on one of our personal favorites, The Avocado, and share some insights that are applicable to all publishers.
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The plight of the publishing industry is no secret. The landscape is continually evolving, leaving publishers scrambling to keep up. With third parties exerting more control over content distribution and engagement, publishers are becoming more disconnected from their audiences and more reliant on external platforms. Now, more than ever, we’re seeing the largest, most successful publishers, confront these issues head-on by investing in ways to strengthen the relationships with their audience.
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A highly engaged audience can be a publisher's greatest asset. More direct traffic, time on site and subscriptions, better performing ads, and increased reader advocacy are all byproducts of loyal, engaged audiences. However, with more and more sources battling for reader attention, converting casual readers into loyal contributors can be a challenge for publishers.
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Yesterday, on October 5th, we were alerted to a security breach that impacted a database from 2012. While we are still investigating the incident, we believe that it is best to share what we know now. We know that a snapshot of our user database from 2012, including information dating back to 2007, was exposed. The snapshot includes email addresses, Disqus user names, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text for 17.5MM users. Additionally, passwords (hashed using SHA1 with a salt; not in plain text) for about one-third of users are included.
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It doesn’t take long to master the basics of using Disqus including all the best commenting and moderation features and shortcuts. Whether you’re new to Disqus or have been around this corner of the web for a while, it’s easy to learn something new every day.
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Over the past year, the design team at Disqus has worked with product management and leadership make our product development process more open and inclusive. Myself, the Product Design Lead, along with the Design Team at Disqus successfully introduced design thinking practices, including user research and creative brainstorm sessions, across the company. At the heart of this work is the Product Discovery Sprint.
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When we release new features like Comment Policy or the new Toxicity Filter, the Disqus Blog is your go-to place to learn about the latest product developments. In reality, we ship updates and deploy new code every day that improves Disqus constantly for both publishers and commenters. Some of the changes we make however are never announced on the blog. In this post, we want to share 7 small updates to Disqus that you should know about. They include various bug fixes and improvements to popular features. These changes are all made possible thanks to the feedback you’ve shared with us so thank you for your continued support ♥ Here now are recent updates we’ve made to make Disqus better for you.
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The Toxicity Mod Filter, a new feature to help publishers detect and manage toxic comments, is now available for publishers across our network.
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It’s no secret that at Disqus we love using Slack for team communication and collaboration. One of the things that Slack does really well is turn links you post into rich and engaging preview content.
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The new Comment Policy feature on Disqus lets you highlight the rules of your community. Not every community moderates in the same way. A comment that is allowed in one community may be moderated in another. Your comment policy is one way to align those expectations with your readers from the very beginning. Furthermore, posting the rules for discussion not only improves the likelihood that a comment falls within a community’s guidelines, it also increases participation overall, according to research by CivilServant. In other words, your comment policy can be a place to leverage community norms for behavior that can save publishers time with moderation.
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Earlier this year, we committed to fighting hate speech and began taking the first steps toward curbing toxicity on Disqus. As a Product Analyst, I focus on developing technology to facilitate good content. Our goals for this technology are to enhance community management tools for moderators, give users more power to address abuse and toxic comments within the communities they participate in, and improve the internal tools that our Abuse team uses for reviewing reported content that violates our Terms and Policies.
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