This idea has been brought up several times before on Steemit, including by myself several months ago. I mention it again because I still think it is a terrific application for the Steem blockchain and want to keep it on the front burner for any Steem developers wondering how to spend all that free time they're going to have over the Christmas holiday. :)
The idea, of course, is to create a Steem-based competitor to Disqus.
Here are some Disqus metrics (source: SimilarTech):
-used on 691,876 websites and 371,012 unique domains
-used on Foxnews.com, godaddy.com and breitbart.com
-reaches 900 million viewers monthly and 300 million commenters
As impressive as these numbers are, Disqus is only the #2 commenting plugin - Facebook is first. So it is clear that commenting plugins are big business reaching a large section of the internet community and offer the potential for enormous exposure to a non-crypto audience for a technology like Steem.
But what advantages does Steem have over Disqus? Why would a website owner want to switch?
More engagement. When the commenters on your website get rewarded with Steem for making intelligent comments and upvoting other comments or articles, they're going to spend more time reading more content (and building content) on your site.
More revenue. I'm not sure if this is possible, but could website owners receive a percentage of the Steem that is being earned by commenters on their site? If so, the incentive to switch to Steem Comments from Disqus is getting stronger!
Would this be difficult to build? I'm not a developer, so I can't say. Let's hear from some Steem developers in the comments below how many hours they think it would take to build this.
Other things to consider: marketing, technical support, education. Who is going to market this? Where are non-technical users with no exposure to cryptocurrency going to get their questions answered? Who is going to show website owners how to implement this technology?
Websites like coindesk.com and cryptocoinsnews.com would be ideal early adopters/testbeds for this application.
So anyone else think this is a good idea? Who is going to build it? How can we make this happen?