Posts by Michael Gately

Déjà vu all over again?

Let's face it—you, as a Disqus publisher, don't have the time or resources to sit there and manually review each comment being posted to your comments section, do you? 

Let's face it—as extraordinarily busy people, we don't always have enough time to respond to everything we see on the internet. Sometimes we only have enough time to react.

Gen Z, born roughly between 1997 and 2012, possesses an estimated $150 billion in collective buying power. They have now surpassed millennials as the largest generation, and there are many characteristics that make them unique.

Last week we published a post on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter for $44 billion. The deal has opened up wide-ranging conversations about where Twitter’s strategy on moderation and free speech might be headed once Musk is officially at the helm of the social media platform. Let’s explore the possible directions in which the Elon Musk Twitter era might take us, and how publishers can plan to navigate them and come out ahead. 

It's official.

Much like we saw at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many brands are currently demonstrating a natural reflex to avoid any and all content related to the war in Ukraine. 

Meet Chris Tang, Frontend Engineer and the very latest addition to the talented Disqus team. Chris joined last month to shore up our Engineering department and quickly demonstrated a knack for making a huge impact right out of the gates. Let's take a look at Chris' career journey so far and what he likes most about being a part of the Disqus team.

One of the key attributes of any successful moderation system is its scalability. For communities with high levels of user engagement, this is especially true—higher engagement translates into more comments and users to have to potentially monitor. Any suite of features that effectively does that work for you is absolutely essential to your team's moderation efforts, because let's face it—nobody has the time or inclination to sit there and moderate each and every comment individually.

Google’s plans for third-party cookie deprecation have become an evolving saga that continues to keep both advertisers and publishers on their digital toes. The phaseout of the legacy technology – at the behest, according to Google, of consumers clamoring for more privacy – has big implications for how advertisers can target and track consumers across channels and devices and how publishers can monetize their audiences. Since Google’s initial announcement, both buy and sell sides have been trialing different solutions that will enable them to continue driving results and revenue in an era without third-party cookies. 

Each month, it seems, there's a new Next Big Thing that everybody is talking or tweeting about—an idea or concept that seems poised to completely revolutionize the world (or the world of digital media at the very least). It seems like just yesterday that the concept of the metaverse was the talk of the internet, but look out—there's a new kid on the block.

Well, it's just about time to close the books on 2021 and take stock of what has been another very complicated year. On one hand, we were forced to press on through another challenging 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but on the other hand, there were causes for hope and optimism due to vaccines and the miraculous work of the medical industry.