Company Blog

Meeting the Masked Man: Behind the Scenes with Mr. Destructoid

When we decided to put a new face on Disqus.com, we knew we wanted to show some love to the sites that use Disqus and use it well. Destructoid was an obvious match. Destructoid isn’t your average gaming site (in the past they’ve been described as “the ‘uncle that tells dirty jokes to kids’ kind of gaming site”), and one of the things that sets them apart is their unique and vibrant community. Niero Gonzalez is the founder of Destructoid and started the site in 2006 as his personal blog. Niero and his team of writers and developers work from all around the world: San Francisco, Miami, Singapore, Tokyo — basically, any place with an internet connection, or access to the latest gaming rumors.

We visited Niero at his developer and community manager’s apartment, in the Mission in San Francisco, to film the video currently featured on our new website. I’m not sure the apartment actually has an official name, but I’m partial to the title “Gamer Cave.” The twelve-year-old version of yourself (and maybe the current version of yourself, depending how much you love video games) would spit up his Capri Sun upon entering the apartment. Inside, it pretty much looks like a video game exploded. Hidden around the apartment are robot heads in every size and material (in honor of Mr. Destructoid, himself, the site’s mascot), perhaps the largest bean bag on the planet, Webby awards and gaming conference photos on every wall, and a unicycle that peeks down from above the refrigerator. I didn’t quite know what to expect before meeting Niero — I had certain expectations for what the father of a “gaming site for gamers, by gamers” would be like. Turns out, it’s sort of impossible not to like the guy. He’s totally down-to-earth, friendly, with a cutting sense of humor and a slight accent. When he took two shots of tequila before we started filming the video, and invited us to join (at 12:30 in the afternoon), it was clear this was a guy who knew not to take things too seriously.

One thing Niero does take seriously is the community that has grown up on his site. He notes that, “Community has a really high value for us…we live and die by our readers.” Destructoid is unusual in that it allows every reader the opportunity to write their own blog on the site — they even feature some of the best ones on the homepage — which isn’t something you’ll see on most gaming sites. The other unique part of the Destructoid community is the comments section. It is one of the best examples I’ve come across of readers really interacting with each other. When you visit a comment thread, distinct, colorful avatars immediately indicate the presence of unique personas, and multiple replies back and forth show a depth of discussion not always present on other sites. Niero is earnest when he says, “I don’t think we would be a popular website without the comments.” So what’s next? They will be closely following the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One news, hands-on, from upcoming trade shows in San Diego, Seattle, Germany, and Japan. If the latest gaming news is your cup of tea (or Red Bull), don’t be afraid to join the Destructoid community and leave your thoughts in the comments.

And when we asked Niero about the future of Destructoid, his answer was simple: they want to take over the world. Neighbors, you’ve been warned.

Our New Site: Same Steak, More Sizzle

Starting today, Disqus.com has a lot more swagger while the Disqus service remains the same community platform that you know and love.

So what’s new about the website and why? The first thing that you’ll notice on our homepage is the former solo artist known as Gravity: it’s now our front man. It’s an interactive visualization of the most active discussions happening live across the galaxy of sites that use Disqus. It shows the breadth and depth of communities enabled by Disqus. It’s for anyone interested in exploring what 120 million people are talking about on Disqus each day. And it showcases our ability to connect people to more stuff they want to talk about. 

The Best Disqus Test Drive Ever

We’ve also made it super clear and super fun to learn how Disqus makes it easy to build a great online community. Check our new test drive of the Disqus community platform. Click around and let the fun begin.

We’ve also profiled a couple of sites that use Disqus in really cool ways. Destructoid is a gaming site like no other. Its community is the heartbeat of the site itself. At one point, they tried building their own comment system. They scrapped that idea, turned on Disqus and never turned back. Hear site founder Niero Gonzalez tell it himself.  

And then there’s Trish O’Keefe, the blogger behind DishByTrish and the new site Sproutd.me.  She and her cofounder are building an online wellness center dedicated to helping women live healthier lifestyles. They’re using Disqus to foster a community that inspires and motivates women to make important lifestyle changes. We love that idea. Hear from Trish herself.

Where Is The Pricing Info? Nowhere.

As some close watchers of Disqus may already know, Disqus is now a fully free service. For everybody, for any site, of any size. How is everything now free? Disqus’ business now centers around new advertising built on top of content discovery. It’s the way we bring more traffic to sites using Disqus and how we’re also helping them make money from their communities.

What’s It Like to Work at Disqus?

Wonder no more, because it’s a kick-ass time all around. We’re a team of geeks (in the best possible sense). We’re committed to building great things in great ways. And we never get outhustled. Whether you’re an engineer looking to build the next big thing, a data geek looking for a bigger sandbox or a sales pro who can quote Glengarry Glen Ross, there’s a spot for you. Check out who we’re looking to bring on.

Meet The Web’s Community of Communities

Finally, our new about page shows more leg than ever. For a while now, we’ve been calling Disqus “the web’s community of communities” within our own walls. It’s a single statement that captures who we are and what we do. Our mission is to make it easy to create and participate in online communities. We then make it easier for people to connect to those sites.

We’re also telling more of a story about how we got started, what guides our thinking and what we believe in. Did you know our two founders gave up all the luxury of college life to start Disqus? If you use Disqus or do business with Disqus, you now have more of the “us” about Disqus. And it’s all good. We hope you agree.

New Connections via Disqus. But Only If You Want To.

One of the great things about Disqus is the diversity of conversations, sites and people across our network. On any given day, there are 120 million people connecting to Disqus to be part of discussions covering all topics imaginable. Increasingly, people are finding new stuff to talk about by connecting with other commenters.

So over the past year, we’ve been building ways that make it easier for you to find and follow people on Disqus who may help you discover new communities. In the last couple of months, we released improvements to profiles, My Disqus and digest emails to make it easier to discover new discussions across Disqus. 

With the continued goal of helping you discover interesting content, we’re making it even easier to find and follow interesting Disqus users on your favorite communities. Today, we’re announcing the public release of three new features: upvoting visibility, finding Disqus friends on Facebook and private activity. 

See who upvotes your comments

Did you know that people vote more than 80 million times every month on Disqus? An upvote is a quick way to show someone that you liked what they had to say. Now, you can find out who has upvoted comments by hovering your mouse over the upvote arrow.

If you’re interested in finding out a little more about a user who has upvoted a comment then you can easily click on their avatar to show their full profile. Follow them if you’re interested in discovering some of their favorite communities. 

Find friends from Facebook already using Disqus

You already have the ability to use Disqus by logging in with your Facebook login. Now we’ve made it as easy to follow your Facebook friends on Disqus. You can add this to your Disqus account by connecting to Facebook. 

More control over your activity

We’re also happy to announce that starting today, you can choose to keep your comment activity private. Your activity will still be public to anyone on the site where you left them, but your activity through your profile or other activity feeds will not be public. 

When you make your Disqus activity private, the following restrictions are added to your account: 

• Your comment history and activity will only be viewable by you.
• People who are currently following your account will no longer be able to see your activity via your profile or daily digest emails.    
• People will no longer be able to follow your account. The number of existing followers will still appear in your profile stats, but they will not be able to view your activity.  

Please visit our FAQ for more information or questions about this new feature.

Community Measurement: New Analytics for All

Building a community is hard. Buckets of blood, sweat, and tears go into it. For over 2.5 million sites, Disqus is a part of that community building process. But sometimes it can feel like guesswork. We’re now making that arduous process of increasing readership even easier: announcing analytics for all publishers.

Every site can benefit from analytics, and with recent infrastructure upgrades we’re now able to offer these services to everyone. Previously, only a select number of publishers that paid us a fee every month received comprehensive analytics that included metrics like most replied to comments and the social login breakdown of their users.

The initial cut of our new analytics cover two key areas:

• Commenting: number of comments, number of votes, and top comments
• Revenue: money earned from using Promoted Discovery

Admittedly we’re starting simple, but it now allows you, for example, to see how posts you make coincide with how many comments are posted. Based on our analysis of the last 2 months of data, the most comments are posted on Wednesdays and the least on Saturdays. See if your community’s trends match up!

Over the next few months we’ll continue to add insights like which commenters are new versus returning and traffic referrals from within the Disqus network.

Check out your new analytics now. Have feedback or a specific metric you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments below!

Trying out this Go thing…

Last Thursday, May 16th, we shipped our first Go project into production.

Disqus has a history of using one tool for the job and hammering through everything. Until now, that tool has been Python. This mentality has been extremely beneficial for us since we are a small team. Everyone is able to jump in to any piece of our stack with minimal effort.

So what was the problem?

Our realtime was having issues. It was slightly short of… realtime. The original realtime backend was written as a pretty lightweight Python + gevent service that handled a few basic tasks. Realtime consists of four components: a queue, a nozzle, a transformer, and a publisher. Everything was Python, except for the queue, which was something implemented on top of Redis.

The rate of messages has since increased, and our backends were having a bit of an issue scaling to our needs. We had 4 servers, each at maximum capacity, and our end-to-end latency was at best a few seconds. At worst, minutes. At peak, we process 10k+ messages per second.

Realtime is a pretty critical component to Disqus, so we decided to try something a bit different.

Why Go?

Go was initially very attractive to us. The language felt very natural coming from Python backgrounds, and the performance approaches C levels. The goroutine model and channels are very easy to work and immensely powerful to manage concurrency.

In roughly a week’s time, I went from initial commit to shipping replacement backends while only having a cursory level of Go knowledge. To me, that’s highly impressive. Our realtime end-to-end latency is on average, less than 10ms, and currently consuming roughly 10-20% available CPU on one machine at peak.

Overall, this should yield a much more responsive experience for our users, and gives us a lot of room to grow in the future. I look forward to trying out more Go and seeing where it can fit into our stack.

THE FUTURE

Would I use Go again? Absolutely! We were very happy with our results and can only imagine it getting better the more we learn. I highly recommend anyone giving it a chance and checking out what it has to offer for you.

I look forward to trying out Go for more projects and start contributing back libraries.

Does this sound fun to you? Looking for a job writing Go? Come work with us at Disqus!