Do I keep Disqus?

In the end, this decision belongs to the people who comment on my blog.

I’ve been using Disqus for several months now, and it’s worked extremely well. Daniel and Jason are both awesome people who have been extremely responsive to my gripes, suggestions, and annoyances despite the fact that they have thousands of bloggers signed up for their system.

Here’s my dilemma: I’m not sure that comments should be divorced from their posts.

Fred Wilson made a post the other day on the USV blog about their investment (congrats to both parties) in Disqus and why they think it is a good one.

Here is the key part:

This allows the comments to go anywhere and everywhere where there is an audience for them. Abstracting comments from the blog hosting platform does for comments what RSS has done for content; it allows the comments to flow freely to whatever place it should most logically be consumed.

I think the place they should most logically be consumed is with the post that began the discussion. If we back up and treat blog posts like Forum threads (the similarities are huge): would you ever remove the first post in a forum thread? Not likely.

The other, admittedly selfish reason I am considering switching back to the WordPress comment system is simple: with Disqus the comments I receive are not on my site. Yes, they appear on my site, with my posts. But the all-knowing Google will consistently steers searchers to a site that is not mine.

Is it worth the trade? Let me know what you think.