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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

As noted in the article the level of quality of comments is much higher with Facebook comments, plus with the comments showing up on people's Facebook stream it gives Techcrunch a huge amount of free publicity.

So I doubt they need money to convince them to use Facebook over Disqus.

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I was a regular contributor to Techcrunch comments (and not a troll), but I haven't commented once since they moved to Facebook comments. And I won't.

This Techcrunch article is the first one in a week or more that I have read the comments. And I've pretty much tuned out of Techcrunch now, and moved over exclusively to HN. I used to have Techcrunch open all day, every day. Now it's gone.

So, one switch from Disqus to Facebook comments lost me - a long time reader of TC, and an active participant at TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50. And they probably don't even know it.

I wasn't in love with the Disqus system, but there was one feature that was right for me, that FB comments don't have: separation from Facebook.

This (comment activity shows up in Facebook stream) is precisely why I won't be commenting on Techcrunch articles any time soon. I have no interest in advertising to my aunt and high school ex-girlfriends that I have a minute opinion about some random bit of software technology. I'm not looking for anonymity to troll, I just want to control my various internet personas. More for the sake of my "real friends" than anything else.

When you make a comment there's a tickbox which you can untick so it doesn't go to your stream.

uh, I totally disagree with both you and the blog author that quality of comments is higher. Yes, 80% of the trolling from before needed to be eliminated, but at least there was discussion and disagreement about the topics covered.

The majority of the comments on techcrunch are now the most bland, content-free statements you could imagine ("this is good!"), and the spammers are still around, only now they get to post links to their site from an account that links back to their facebook page. victory?

Yes the quality of the comments increased, but the number of comments decreased in every article which implies less interaction. Thus if this trend goes, techcrunch might end comment less. thus loosing the free publicity that they after.

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