Why Facebook comments is a bad idea for your site
techfounder.net
techfounder.net
If the purpose of your site is to generate discussion, include a discussion mechanism. If you like the clean look and don't want comments, expect less feedback.
Sending users elsewhere, or requiring extra clicks to see the conversation means less engagement. Maybe that's what some want, and use it as an effort to separate wheat and chaff ... but frankly, that's what moderation is for.
Frankly I prefer to use my existing identities to comment than have to sign up each time on someones service just to be able to comment.
I do like that you can see comments from many sites with Disqus though.
This way, there doesn't have to be one end-all-be-all conversation. Instead, there's just a button to jump start viral conversations directed by the users who interact with their friends and spread the news and conversation that way.
Name/email/url. These three simple fields make it easy. Don't make me try to figure out how to talk back to you.
Doesn't matter if you offer guest commenting by default. I close the browser tab the moment I see the non-standard comment box. I don't have any idea what hassles some arbitrary-comment system will have, so unless I really have something to say, then I'll just not bother.
I have a Disqus login, and sometimes I'll have something important enough to say that I'll go through the pain of using it. But it's not easy, nor simple to do. It adds extra burden on the user, and IMO reduces conversation on sites.
This is not unique to Disqus, the same problem exists for all third-party comment systems. The fact that the comment system is third-party is the fundamental problem that you'll need to overcome. When I see somebody else's branding on the comments, I'm out. Don't even stick around long enough to read them.
If there's a benefit to FB commenting by providing more engagement, I'm not seeing it. I love the LiveFyre system, but I'm not seeing a lot of engagement there, either.
My opinion is that any little thing you do to make commenting harder by even a tiny amount has a huge impact on participation. To make matters worse, you're giving up sometimes valuable feedback and participation content to Facebook, which just monetizes it instead of you.
Maybe there's a way to make it pay off. If so, I'd like to hear it.
When you say you're not seeing a lot of engagement with FB/Livefyre, were those sites seeing engagement before with a worse commenting system?
We switched ForeignPolicy.com over to livefyre from the Drupal built-in system and saw a big increase in participation, both in average comments per article and the number of multi-message 'conversations' that people were having in the comments section. That said, we already have an engaged audience, and a big chunk of the benefit may have been new moderation tools that let us reduce spam/trolls.
I don't think that any system will create engagement out of thin air, except in the rare case of a site with a rabid fan base and no commenting/forum system, but i'd argue that systems like disqus and livefyre make people more likely to jump in because they don't need to create an account with you.
tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
Does this ever happen in any appreciable amount? The TOS for what FB will kill a comment for is pretty reasonable.
As to decentral places, meh. I don't blog for a living, and don't have time to deal with spammers, trolls, and asshats. Something like Disqus or Intensedebate handles that nicely, with no nebulous "freedom of speech" issues. Heck even Facebook, to a lesser extent.
Many people have blocked all domains associated with Facebook in order to maintain privacy and thwart their internet-wide tracking.
Have sites that enabled Fb commenting experienced a decrease in viewership? Commenting? Quality of comments? How does this vary based on the audience in question?
Some of these questions have academic answers, some don't. The proper way to figure this out is by by experimenting. Not affirming diktats from your personal beliefs.
Thus, despite not visiting your site, he can still have an opinion about not liking to potentially comment on it if it contains FB comments. This is not some weird generalization or overstepping his bounds, its the same as someone saying "I don't like sites that have ads so think twice about littering your site with them" and then someone else responding "BUT how do you know if you've never seen my site?!".
using fb comments - on average over all sites - always increase the valid comments you will get - and compared to old wordpress-standard-installations, decreases spam (the difference was between "a lot of spam" and "nothing")
i did not apply a quality metric, but reading over the (valid, not spam) comments i could not determine a (subjective) trend in either (good / stupid) direction.
yeah, i'm not a big fan of fb comments either, but well, if your blogs goal is to get comments (for whatever reason) then i would advise for the fb comment plugin.
and: it would be cool if you prove me wrong (with data).
i think this is a good time as any to quote Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape: "If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine."
Well, on my own CMS I had one single spam comment so far, and a few anonymous ones. generally not many comments, but no spam worth speaking of either. The captcha is nothing more complex than 'Please enter "14" in the field below.'. (with a different number between 10 and 99 each time) Keeps bots out, doesn't bother people.
Also, the highest quality comments from real people and least spam I have seen anywhere on the internet are on Hacker News and on Reddit. Guess what both sites have in common? Anonymous hassle-free posting. The Hacker News sign up page contains the least amount of information needed to sign up possible - alias and password - and nothing more. It rivals the Google home page in its simplicity and functionality. Meanwhile discussion boards with elaborate "real names", "track you" and "exotic captcha" solutions are riddled with spam and heavy on both inane and trollish comments, showing that spammers motivated by profit are not deterred by complex sign ins, only legitimate users are.
WRT to SEO, anonymity, posting on your feed and notifications.. FB comments are crawlable, You can still remain anonymous with FB comments (sign-in with a yahoo account, etc.) and you can skip posting it on your feed and I've been notified everytime someone has liked/replied to a comment I've made using Facebook comments. More so than Wordpress, who wants to subscribe to a popular author and constantly get notifications throughout the day whenever anyone makes a comment??
FB has a penetration of roughly 50% of the population in first world developed nations, and that seems to be its zenith (usage has actually started falling in the US and other early-adopter regions). So you're excluding roughly half your potential participants.
How the FB usage pattern distributes across your target/desirable population is of course another question. I don't have the answers on that.
i did a similar research of fb enabled signeups vs. non fb signups (on desktop web apps) - outcome: if you enable signups via fb, you get more signed up users.
i think the pro/con fb comments/signups discussion should be based on data (data that is easy to get on our own webproperties) and not on opinions.
Here's a blog post I wrote about switching to DISQUS http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/disqus-addressed-my-concerns-...
> Now the downsides, which are probably determinative for us. First, quite simply a lot of people don’t trust Facebook for reasons that range from quite reasonable to totally paranoid. Second, and more significant in my mind, is that many people don’t want to bring their true identities into the comments section of a political site. [...]
> For those two reasons, especially the second, we’re probably never going to do this.
It's like "yeah we know people probably won't like it, but fuck them."
Would you post an "At my job we use technology X..." comment with your real name? You could easily get fired for breaking NDA even if you don't expose anything critical at all.
Parts of the post sound very contradicting to your actually post title.
Regardless, to answer your third bullet, yes the author can setup Facebook comments to give him/her notifications that you did leave a comment. Granted, I guess there is no UI to let you know that the author was notified, but most blogs (not using Facebook comments) don't have a UI for that either.
I personally like Disqus comment system on blogs because it gives you the option to comment in various ways. It's a win-win-win!
I mention that in some cases it might make sense to have it - but in the case of technical or professional blogs / articles, that usually is not the case.
Even if I did have a feel for how those comments currently are integrated with other FB comment streams, none of us has any idea of how FB will change their policies in the future that will totally wreck our personal notions of "separation of concerns".
Your counterpoint only addresses the first of his three reasons.
I'm part of a group blog with an active community, and we've experimented with various commenting systems. Our problem hasn't been getting user engagement, it's getting quality engagement. The nature of our blog (a cultural blog) unfortunately invites a lot of trollish and abusive comments.
We've experimented with our blogging platform's native comment system, Disqus, LiveFyre, and Facebook. Right now, we've got Facebook Comments active. The number of abusive comments seems to have decreased, as have the number of good comments (most probably because of the barriers of using Facebook). So the jury is still out on which is best for us.
Looking at TechCrunch's comments, it doesn't look like Facebook Comments has helped their quality level that much - though it's much better than Disqus.
So I'd advise understanding your audience before deciding which comment system is best for your site. Each system has its pros & cons. You just have to determine if the cons are worth the pros for you.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen the lively discussions we used to get when using LiveFyre. So there's definitely a trade-off. We're definitely not sold on Facebook Comments yet; it's just our most recent experiment.
Yes! When you frame it like that, as in "different technologies/providers may be better in different contexts", it seems so simple. Yet people get hung up on the "always do X and never do Y" approaches.
- When we run a corporate brand community (such as causes.com/att), our clients LOVE the number of and types of comments that people leave on the page. We've all been impressed with the quality of the comments as well.
- Grammar filter (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/commen...): adds punctuation (e.g. periods at the end of sentences), trims extra whitespace, expands slang words (e.g. plz becomes please), adds a space after punctuation (e.g. Hi,Cat would become Hi, Cat), and fix common grammar mistakes (e.g. convert ‘dont' to ‘don’t’). tl;dr Comments that look good encourage more good comments.
Facebook comments are obviously not a one-size-fits-all solution, but we've been able to use it pretty well.
Anyone have experience with disqus in this regard?
Personally, if I enable comments on a site, it is because I hope the comments will form a constructive part of the content of that site. I wouldn't want half my content to disappear on account of a policy change or bankruptcy that is entirely separate from whatever it is I am doing myself.
I've been toying with the idea of hacking together a system that allows replying/commenting via email (effectively auto generating a mailing-list for every post or something to that effect) -- and allowing the comment interface to effectively become a limited webmail gateway to that list.
I don't want my every interaction on the web connected.
I am getting tired of the social web.
I came up with the following: email is optional, and used for notification as well as editing/deleting the comment. Assuming the email is used for only that, I think that's as convenient and fair as it can get.