Comments on Tumblr, real actual comments with threads and all

[unjapanologist]

There's a way to install comments functionality on a tumblr! I was working on the upcoming reboot of the good old Symposium blog today, and since the built-in commenting system of WordPress seemed a bit clunky, I decided to try out Disqus. Disqus is a free commenting service widely used on blogs that lets people comment with their Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Disqus accounts. I've used it elsewhere, but until I visited its website today, I had no idea that Disqus can also be installed on individual tumblrs.

(ETA: Some background from troisroyaumes: There was a time when Disqus was in wider use on Tumblr, but it seems to have faded into obscurity after Tumblr added more options for users to interact.)

I've been trying it out with our group tumblr that shall not be named, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm ridiculously excited about finally being able to comment in public on the beautiful things my esteemed colleagues post. Tumblr is fun and all, but we usually end up turning to mail for leisurely gushing and discussion, and it always feels like such a shame to separate feedback from a work.

Installing the commenting system on a tumblr is easy: log in or make an account at disqus.com, then follow the instructions on how to register a tumblr and add the commenting system to the tumblr's preferences. Here's a how-to with pictures. Here's the basic commenting FAQ from Disqus' website, and some more questions.

Good/normal things:

• Disqus sends e-mail notifications when someone replies to a Tumblr post or to another comment. (The commenting system is managed through your Disqus account, not through Tumblr, so comment notifications don't show up in the Tumblr dashboard.)
• Comments are threaded.
• You can subscribe to threads via e-mail or RSS.
• Editing comments is possible.
• As is up- and downvoting, and starring posts. These features are native to Disqus.
• Comments get individual links.
• The owner of the Disqus account on which the installation runs, presumably the owner of the Tumblr, gets an easily recognizable "mod" label next to their comments.
• Mods can delete comments, blacklist commenters or report comments as spam (upper right corner of a comment).
• Disqus shows two tabs under each post, "Discussion" (default) and "Community". Clicking "Community" gives you a sort of overview of discussions and commenters on your tumblr, which is cool.
• You can apparently upload or drag and drop images into a comment (2MB max). Links to Flickr will embed an image, and links to YouTube will embed the video. The image uploading worked great for me in Firefox but not at all in Chrome, and I haven’t figured out why.

There's some serious rough spots that don't make this a great alternative for a native commenting system (although the native commenting system suffers from the fatal flaw of not existing).

• Installing this only allows comments on one tumblr, it obviously doesn't let you comment on tumblrs that don't have Disqus installed. Many people would probably have to install Disqus before it turns really useful for fannish community-building - it’s hardly an instant LJ replacement for those who miss that space.
• To post a comment, you need to log in via Disqus, which is only posible through a Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Disqus account. Not your actual tumblr account. You can create a Disqus account straight from the comments, but still, it's a bother.
• There's some not-so-obvious weird things. For instance, removing/anonymizing or editing comments is possible if they were posted by a registered Disqus commenter, but people who logged in via a third-party service like Twitter need to contact a mod.

We've survived worse confusion and inconvenience than this, though. For crotchety old people who want Tumblr to work more like forums/DW/LJ/whatever *raises hand*, it's definitely better than no commenting functionality at all. I'll update this post if more pros and cons emerge.

Comments

[anatsuno]

I wish I'd known you were looking for this earlier! I'd have pointed you at Disqus - I chose tumblr precisely bc of the lack of hosted commenting, personally, so never considered adding Disqus to mine, but I've seen it in actions several places. Glad you found something that works for you :))

[unjapanologist]

:D I had absolutely no idea, and I knew Disqus, dammit. It really combines the best of DW/LJ with the advantages of Tumblr for me.

[troisroyaumes]

Disqus was more popular on Tumblr prior to replies, asks and the development of the Dashboard. When I started using Tumblr (Dec 2008), almost everyone had Disqus because it was the only way to interact. But alas, almost no one bothers with Disqus comment conversations nowadays because it's an extra click away from the Dashboard.

[unjapanologist]

Oooh, interesting. I only really got into Tumblr this year, so 2008 might as well be two decades ago. Around when did people stop using Disqus widely?

The dashboard doesn't appeal to me much because I can't react to it well unless I spend a lot of time keeping an eye on it, and I have way too many other spaces demanding attention and time. I vastly prefer things that poke me when they want me to do something (rss feeds, email notifications and the like). And the replies format just refuses to appeal to me. I can't seem to let go of threaded discussions.

[troisroyaumes]

I could probably crank out a more concrete time point if I looked at my Disqus account, but off the top of my head, I think it was pretty much around when notes got implemented. Reblogs were available when I first joined, but they weren't used so much as a means of conversation, especially when notes weren't around to handily link to people who added commentary with their reblogs. So notes, and then the implementation of replies, seem to have really killed off Disqus conversations, at least in my corner of Tumblr.

I like threaded discussions as well and don't much like replies or reblogs as a method of conversation, but alas, I haven't gotten a Disqus comment in several months! (Probably wouldn't get any at all if I didn't still have a few people who followed my Tumblr by RSS rather than through their Dashboard.)

[unjapanologist]

So notes, and then the implementation of replies, seem to have really killed off Disqus conversations,

Do you think maybe Disqus didn't have the critical mass of adopters that would have let it remain a default way of having conversations on Tumblr? If enough new people come in who don't hear about Disqus right away and automatically adopt what seems to be the only possible way to interact, replies and notes, then it would make sense for Disqus to become less and less familiar or popular. I'd honestly never heard of it being used on Tumblr, but I've read (and participated it) very many LJ conversations in the past year or so about how hard it is to have discussions on Tumblr. Nobody ever mentioned it.

I'm starting to get the feeling that RSS is for old people who are afraid they'll miss something ;) Tumblr doesn't seem to play well with RSS. I'm following a couple of tumblrs in google reader, but the updates always seem to come a very long time after the post was actually made.

[troisroyaumes]

Quite possibly. It didn't help that a lot of the more popular themes didn't have built-in Disqus support. (If one didn't use a theme with such support, I'd say that there would need to be a baseline familiarity with HTML and CSS to feel comfortable with the idea of installing Disqus.) Most of the fannish migration and the general explosion of growth of Tumblr also happened after notes were implemented; before then, it was less a social networking site and more a microblogging platform.

[charmian]

Random person wandering in:

I agree with troisroyaumes that Notes helped kill Disqus popularity. However, I think the way most heavy users of Tumblr interact nearly always through the Dashboard is what really makes it impossible for it to lift off. The Dashboard is basically like the friends list on LJ, and so for most people it is how they read their friends, the people they're most likely to comment to. Since Disqus doesn't show up in the posts on the Dashboard at all, no one can see how many comments there are, so new people are unlikely to join in existing conversations.

Reblogs wouldn't be so bad for conversations if there was a way to filter out all the Likes and contentless Reblogs, and if formatting didn't become screwed up once a post was reblogged back and forth.

[unjapanologist]

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Disqus is really very confined to one tumblr, so while it may be a great way to interact with people who already talk to you regularly, it doesn't help with outreach at all.

The formatting is a big, big part of what makes conversations-through-reblogs hard to read. That and the way conversations get scattered around with different threads going on completely independently of each other. It's not the virtual equivalent of passing a single paper around to talk with friends during class, but more like writing the first sentence, making ten copies, and then passing all the papers to different people so completely separate conversations develop. My LJ/DW brain still wants to read all the previous comments before I say something.

[charmian]

It would work, I think, if the blog was read like a wordpress blog is. I don't think it's a matter of "people who already talk to you regularly," but more of a matter of "non-tumblr users" vs. "tumblr users."

It's like email, I think. Sort of like a mailing list, in a way. However images and non-text posts also get weird formatting.

[unjapanologist]

*nod* Yeah, Disqus may be pretty non-obvious to people whose default idea of a conversation online is not something that looks like that. And the fact that you can't comment with a Tumblr account doesn't help.

Threaded comment discussions feel pretty different from email/a mailing list to me, but maybe that's my particular history with communication methods talking. I remember emerging from a world of mailing lists into DW/LJ and being amazed by the different ways in which people interacted. No idea if they might look kind of the same to people who've "grown up" with Tumblr-style conversations, though..

[bookshop]

thank you so much for the instruction manual! I'd seen other people around tumblr with disqus comments but until this post it never clicked that i could, uh, do that myself. :)

[unjapanologist]

Glad it's useful! I'd managed to miss it completely, hence the enthusiasm.