Facebook launches overhauled comment system | Hacker News Reader

Facebook launches overhauled comment system

techcrunch.com

57 pointssiddhant55 comments

When building out Appleseed, I decided on a principle early on that's important for a sense of social... well, not privacy, that's not the right word. Segmentation, more like it.

But first, humans rely on segmentation. I want to know that if I'm hanging out in a bar with a bunch of friends, I can talk a certain way that I would never talk around my parents or my extended family. If a member of that social group walks into the bar, it's awkward, but on some level, they opened that pandora's box, by encroaching on my social space.

Facebook doesn't seem to understand that, preferring instead to just dump everything into one box labelled "Social!" and forgetting that you interact with your friends different from your family, your coworkers, etc.

So for Appleseed, the principle I'm focusing on is that, when you report to your friends, you report on contexts, not actions.

So, when you upload a photo, or post a journal entry, or a status update, you're creating context, and the appropriate friends are notified of that context.

However, when you comment on that context, you are taking an action. The recipients of that context are notified, but your friends are not (unless they're already mutual friends of the context owner).

In other words, Alice posts a journal entry to her College Buddies friends circle. Bob comments on that journal entry. Alice's College Buddies friends circle is notified of Bob's comment, but Bob's friends are not notified unless they are also one of Alice's College Buddies.

This isn't perfect, someone so inclined can still search for your comments and find them, provided the privacy settings are open enough. But let's as least make stalking require an extra action, instead of doing it for the user.

I agree 100% with your statements except that I think Facebook does understand this. After all, isn't this exactly what the Lists/Groups feature does (albeit, un-intuitively)?

I believe that Facebook knows this is a concern and this is why they relaunched the Groups feature recently. It's a hard problem to solve from a UX perspective. Most normal users would be confused by segregating things out even if there was an easy UI solution for creating/publishing to these groups.

Look to their recent acquisition of Beluga to get a sense of where this is going. They are obviously interested in moving into the group messaging space.

Lets not fool ourselves, though. Facebook has some vested interest in making things more public so that advertisers and media outlets can use them without issue.

There's an inherent tension between people's desire for granular control and their resistance to exercising that control, ie I want robust lists, but I don't want to have to manage them. I kind of feel like once list/group data is portable between services/networks, it won't be as big of a problem, since you'd only have to do it once, and management after that can be at the time of contact creation/connection.

I also think using the physical place metaphors more explicitly could be interesting. Like you could make a "bar" place, where your bar friends gather. Functionally I suppose it would be identical to Facebook groups.

What I'm really hoping for, though is that in the future once identity data is portable, the existing social networks will be more akin to places. Facebook will be the place for shallow, bland, regulated, cursory interaction. Twitter will be the place for shouting loud and pithy aphorisms in public. You could create private places for different purposes as the needs arise.

I don't know that I agree that data portability is the problem. Nearly everyone (college aged kids) I know use Facebook exclusively for social networking. I don't think they care if their groups are portable.

I think the root problem is encouraging people to make them. I think this is why Groups became shareable but a better UX or automatic algorithm for creating them would help tremendously. Some kind of incentive for creating groups would help as well. I think the group messaging features could do this (group text, especially).

You're probably right, and I'm speaking mostly from my place of aversion to Facebook. But anecdotally I feel like there is a slow shift away from Facebook happening.

Dave Winer talks about the cyclical nature of these things, and I think I agree that while we're in a closed part of the cycle right now, we're heading toward a more open one.

I was added to a Facebook group.

It's something I'm only peripherally interested in.

It generates way to much content. It seems like a step toward Facebook becoming more spammy than it was.

I agree that Facebook understands the need to segment and the need to not be spammy. But suspect Facebook is still going to be drawn down that road because it has only a limited amount of things it can do make/keep the site interesting - aside from the impetus for public-for-advertising stuff.

I've never heard of anyone being added to so many Facebook groups that it was a problem for them to just remove themselves from the ones they didn't like. I've been added to three since they rolled them out and I'm a fairly heavy user.

It causes a problem in that it creates more overhead. having a facebook account is creating more an more overhead for users as time goes on. Every time they change privacy settings you have to go read some article on how to make sure this or that bit of data hasn't been revealed to people you don't want it to be revealed to.

Now with groups, you've got to take an active roll once again in order to keep unwanted messages from hitting your email inbox every time somebody wants to add you to a group. The overhead for the end user keeps creeping upward, and that is the real core issue.

It could have something to do with the group in question producing way too much content though the OP has interest in being in that particular group. Perhaps this is a group for a university class, or potentially a interest group of some sort.

My /etc/hosts file already blocks Facebook's widgets, so I don't see anything in the comments section on TechCrunch. That's a feature and improvement as far as I'm concerned.

TechCrunch kind of hinted at it, but I will never use Facebook to leave a comment on a website (or log-into a site for that matter). I keep my Facebook account separate from everything because I don't trust Zuck whatsoever.

Update: in addition to blocking in /etc/hosts, I run Facebook Disconnect in Chrome which gets rid of all those Like buttons and other annoyances that run on the main Facebook domain and can't be blocked in /etc/hosts without also blocking your access to Facebook directly. It's a fantastic extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambag...

I run Facebook Disconnect too, and it also caused the comments to fail to load on the TechCrunch article, in case you were wondering.

I block connect.facebook.com in /etc/hosts so the comments don't load in any browser for me as the request 404s, Facebook Disconnect is just a bonus.

There's also facebookblocker and Defacer for Safari: http://extensions.apple.com/#social-networking

Incognito stops Facebook on third party sites as well as Google AdSense and Google Analytics:

http://www.orbicule.com/incognito/

It killed the Facebook comments section on this TechCrunch article too.

I feel really bad about this. I'll explain.

Every person has different "social roles" in real life (for friends, business associates, hobby, etc.). But I have only one FB account. With single avatar pic. Imagine leaving a comment on some business related website using this system while I have FB avatar of me on some crazy college drunk party. When I'm socializing on FB website only that's OK, but when you try to go out, that's a big problem. We need a better way to manage our social roles.

If FB comments catch on, Facebook better expect a wave of non-real personas. It's not hard to make/maintain a fake persona. Most of my personal details on FB are not only hidden, but false.

Perhaps this is the strategy to boost their numbers? (Ill advised, I think, but whatever)

I was thinking about this too. But it seems like FB might actually like that, fluff up their user numbers a bit...

Interpersonal relationships are not just "friend" or "not friend", it's far more complicated than that: I worked with a. I went to college with p. I'm best friends with x. I know z.

IIRC the clear distinctions between unrelated friend groups is one of Diaspora's big selling points.

IIRC the clear distinctions between unrelated friend groups is one of Diaspora's big selling points.

A feature that Appleseed has had since around 2007. ;) Except we call them friends "Circles", not "Aspects".

Lack of pseudonyms is going to be a real stumbling block for this.

When I'm conversing with a real person (ie, on Facebook, Twitter or IM) then I'm ok using my real name because there are privacy controls.

When I'm discussing things on HN or TechCrunch, I don't want my opinions being misconstrued out of context... given this society's litigious nature, I think FB comments are not going to take over Disqus/IntenseDebate's market, though they might carve out a nice niche.

I'm very much against this. Facebook does not need a piece of every aspect of our online life. I much prefer Disqus because 1) they aren't facebook and 2) they are way more useful in terms of commenting because it allows you to keep certain opinions off of facebook.

Facebook already has a big brother vibe to it--a feeling echoed by many others I know--why do they keep going further with this sort of thing?

Because they need to make more money? Their vision has been to own identity on the web for quite a while. This is just one more small step in that direction, the big previous step being Facebook Connect itself.

Appear to be uncrawlable by Google/Bing - the closing of the web accelerates, sadly with the full consent and cooperation of users and websites.

Seems like the comments can not be indexed by Google so it seems bad if you want to the comments to help with your SEO efforts.

That will be the best thing that's happened to blog comments in 5 or 6 years.

I don't know about everyone else, but this is the first time in a while where TC comments are actually readable, and are not troll-ridden. This is a good thing.

I actually think it has made the discourse worse, in that we are getting only the cookie cutter replies, of nice article and good job type comments. As much as everyone hates trolls, they do bring up good point sometimes regardless if you agree or disagree with them.

Trolls often say things that people are too scared to say under a real name OR a well known user name. I never understood the problem with just ignoring trolls or laughing at them. I mostly laugh.

To understand the scene on comments, here's a This Week in Startups episode with Daniel Ha, founder of Disqus.

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-start...

Starts at 00:15:00

And at 30:15 he talks about the potential implications of Facebook entering the comments space. His point is that it validates the market.

When you think about it from the perspective of big sites like TechCrunch, requiring that people use their true Facebook identity would virtually eliminate nasty comments overnight. When you're using your true identity people will generally behave a lot better.

If that was the only motive behind Facebook comments I could easily get on board with that, but inevitably Facebook will find deviant and lucrative purposes for the information they gather.

> When you're using your true identity people will generally behave a lot better.

Because obviously no one has fake facebook accounts, and the barrier of creating an account with a plausible sounding name in order to troll people is a high enough barrier of entry to stop trolls. And no one is ever mean to other people in situations where their real name is known.

I admit to being a bit envious of whatever fantasy world you live in.

Sure, trolls will be trolls. But I'd make a bet that average Joe Sixpack might just get tired of logging out of Facebook to log back in with his troll account just so he can post a hit-and-run nasty comment. It's probably enough of a barrier to make an impact.

It may discourage trolling, but I expect it will also mean 90% of comments are made by people who are oblivious that they're trolling with their real identity, people who dont care that they're trolling WTRI, people with big egos, and of course 'social media' people promoting their 'personal brand'.

> When you think about it from the perspective of big sites like TechCrunch, requiring that people use their true Facebook identity would virtually eliminate nasty comments overnight.

Quite possibly by decimating the comment boards. The chilling effect of potentially having your FB history being subpoenaed is quite strong.

Does this go along with AOL's new business model?

The "advantage" FB has is that comments on a 3rd party site get posted to your FB page, and replies to those comments on FB go back to the 3rd party page. I'm not sure that's really that big of an advantage - some may consider it a disadvantage..

The advantage would be to drive more traffic and discussion to the parent site. This is also opt-outable.

Great, trading one slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins block (disqus) for another slow loading invasive comment system that my plugins already block.

Nothing like progress.

Widget block: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hgiihiookhijpbhafl...

Disconnect: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhla...

Can someone explain the appeal of using this over something with support for pseudonyms?

It should result in a moderate reduction in trolling. Mainly it's the same appeal as every other Facebook widget - people commenting on your site must spam all their friends' newsfeeds with your article.

This makes it ideal for a personal blog that you actually do want some of your friends to comment on, ideal for a mass media site driven by pageviews, and hopeless for niche enthusiast sites trying to promote debate.

The other "advantage" claimed by TC - that Facebookers can contribute directly to the comment thread without even visiting the article page never mind reading it - sounds like it has pretty dubious value.

I wonder about the reduction in trolling, too, considering a lot of the comments I've seen on Facebook. I always thought identification would reduce bad behavior, but anecdotally I've found that not to be the case.

Facebook Comments won't touch the ID/Echo/Disqus market share on dominant websites and popular blogs, but it will totally take over the long tail.

With no comment karma or other means of emphasizing the important content, the new Facebook comments plugin is going to totally kill commenting on popular websites like TechCrunch (which, amazingly, is testing it right now. The first post got >1000 comments. With such amounts it's just a lot of noise. If you are big, do it like they do it on Slashdot or don't do it at all!

On the other hand, it can be a real killer feature for small sites that normally would have zero or very few comments, with all interactions moving to Facebooks and Twitters or the world. Now with Facebook Comments, it can stay on Facebook and you don't care as you're still getting your comments back on your blog and the more people share it and comment on it, the bigger chance you get to attract new readers. Amazing opportunity!

What's needed is a browser extension that blocks the facebook comments iframe from reading my facebook session. I currently block their various tracking widgets using the widget block extension, which prevents them from ever being loaded, as they are worthless. But this way I won't ever be able to see the facebook comments at all, which will be aggravating if they become as common as disqus for example. Regrettably that isn't unlikely.

So we need a way of appearing to not have a facebook session when displaying the facebook comments widget on other sites, but not interfering with facebook proper.

Incognito protects your privacy by blocking Google Adsense and Google Analytics on non-Google pages. In addition, it allows you to optionally block Facebook content on third-party websites as well as embedded YouTube movies outside of the YouTube website.

http://www.orbicule.com/incognito/

It blocked the comments on this TechCrunch article for me, and it blocks "Like" buttons everywhere for me too.

This will propagate a new wave of facebook trolls who will create accounts with specific demographics and make vulgar comments in hopes to 1) troll, and 2) make said demographic look bad. Problem is now we can't even tell if they are real or not!

I'm sure it's easy to do some friend graph analysis to determine a ranking similar to pagerank for comments. The troll accounts would sink to the bottom like a rock.

SEO.

I think there is a greasemonkey script in the making to disable the defaulting of the post on facebook tickbox.

In the rare occasion my non-tech friends want to see comments I made on something, I think I can manage to tick the box.

Blocking Facebook in Adblock is the gift that keeps on giving.

No need to resort to an additional mod when all you need to do is toss the following in Adblock:

||facebook.com/

||facebook.net/

||fbcdn.com/

||fbcdn.net/

What's so terrible about the comment system that comes with wordpress?

It doesn't allow for surfacing popular/controversial comments. It keeps everything chronological, which is a good reference, but encourages people to post quickly, without considerable thought.

Would you want Hacker News comment threads ordered chronologically? Exactly.

So what are Disqus's plans now?

Hasn't changed! We've known about this (as well as the launch today) and aren't making any specific plans based on TC's testing of FBComments.

But I'm already invested in my Disqus account and I prefer their pseudo-anonymity approach, also I don't have yahoo nor facebook accounts.

so disqus is unneeded now? now they may ditch wordpress and move entirely to facebook

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