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Why Facebook comments is a bad idea for your site
- bluetidepro 14y agoTitle: "Why Facebook Comments Is A Bad Idea For Your Site" In the article: "Perhaps in some contexts it makes sense" 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!
- pytrin 14y agoI am the author - The article lists reasons where Facebook comments are a bad idea for your site, it is not a generalization. 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.
- shell0x 14y agoI think it's a bad practice to outsource data like comments in general. I prefer keeping controll over the comments. This way the commenters don't get monitored/analyzed by Facebook or another US company, which is important, especially as a European. Maybe Facebook don't like what the commenter wrote on your site and just censor the comment and you won't even realize it. Comments should stay on decentral places, which is important to avoid attacks against the freedom of speech.
- Karunamon 14y ago>Maybe Facebook don't like what the commenter wrote on your site and just censor the comment and you won't even realize it. 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.
- thatusertwo 14y agoFacebook comments are also bad for your viewers who don't have Facebook... Me for example.
- gdilla 14y agoI think one advantage of FB comments is that it supposedly cuts down on trolls, spam, and stupid arguments.
- asdfologist 14y agoYou must be new to FB.
- xqyz 14y agoOr to the internet in general.
- gdilla 14y agoJust sayin - http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/05/starting_later_this_week_tpm.php http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/05/starting_later...
- xqyz 14y agoSame site from the link in the article (http://labs.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/post-1.php http://labs.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/post-1.php): > 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."
- gdilla 14y agoThey also say it frees up their staff to do their jobs rather than moderating. Nothing is perfect. They made a tradeoff.
- juridatenshi 14y ago
- AznHisoka 14y agoIt's also bad SEO-wise. User generated content can help you with long tail rankings
- Kiro 14y agoFacebook comments are crawled.
- franze 14y agoif googlebot chooses to render the page, which is - in my experience - not always the case (sometimes the fb stream got indexed, the spage got found for it, the other time nothing, sometimes a page that got found for a comment then lost the comment again, pretty random stuff). but yeah, if you think it's worth it you can still fetch the fb comment stream and put it below the fb plugin.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoWhat if you want to enhance your local search to comments? e.g. "find entries which have X in one of the comments", or sort stuff by number of comments - anything really? You do nothing, because you can do nothing. You're basically screwed because you thought the input of real people on your work was fit to be outsourced.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lucian303 14y agoIt alienates those of us without a facebook account.
- trueneverland 14y agoI really hate any commenting system that requires me to register. I don't want to have dozens of accounts just because of all these various systems for commenting.
- lmm 14y agoIsn't that an argument in favour of using Facebook? One account for the whole web, rather than one for each individual blog.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoNo, it's an argument for not requiring an acount when it's not necessary. E.g. for simple comments. 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.
- trueneverland 14y agoI prefer name and comment, no registration system
- danielweber 14y agoIsn't that an advantage of third-party commenting, like FB or Disqus? You get the advantages of registration but without having to do it everywhere.
- trueneverland 14y agoYou assume every site uses either of those two. The reason I made the comment I made is because I keep running into unique systems
- bentlegen 14y agoDisqus lets you comment anonymously, or log in with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or a Disqus account.
- mandeepj 14y agoIt's optional to share your comment on your news feed so I don't know why author is hating FB comments.
- crusso 14y agoI do the same thing as the author. If I see that the comment stream is somehow related to my FB account, I skip commenting. I don't know how they're used or how they feed into some other FB stream. 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".
- ajscherer 14y agoWell the three reasons that the author is hating on FB comments are bulleted in his 16 sentence blog post, so it should be relatively easy to figure out why he is hating FB comments. Your counterpoint only addresses the first of his three reasons.
- franze 14y agoi did some simple number crunching some time ago (> 8 months ago) on some clients sites and on a few private and friendly (which gave me access to their data) web-properties. it wasn't a big sample (6 sites all in all) but well, it's the data i had. outcome: 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."
- dredmorbius 14y agoYour data do also inherently self-select unless you're conducting your research very carefully. Once you throw up a "FB required for comments" requirement, you're going to start shooing away many people who'd otherwise be interested in participating. Some/many will simply never come back. 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.
- franze 14y agoas i said before: i would love that somebody comes up with a better study and proves my mini sample wrong, sadly i know none. 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.
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- alpb 14y agoI am using DISQUS (version 2012) for a while on my personal blog and I am very pleased. I get more comments than the times I installed FB Comments, I get more traction and people actually share through DISQUS star button. Here's a blog post I wrote about switching to DISQUS http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/disqus-addressed-my-concerns-pretty-well/ http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/disqus-addressed-my-concerns-...
- brudgers 14y agoIMO, a Facebook account shouldn't be a prerequisite for any action on the internet other than using Facebook.
- PCheese 14y agoYou do not necessarily need a Facebook account to post on the comments plugin. See the "other login providers" section on the docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comme...
- droithomme 14y agoThat is using Facebook, and it makes use of the implicit, non-consensual Facebook shadow accounts that Facebook creates for all anonymous users, who are extensively tracked across the internet. Many people have blocked all domains associated with Facebook in order to maintain privacy and thwart their internet-wide tracking.
- jonknee 14y agoI have Facebook resources blocked (thanks Facebook Disconnect!) so I won't ever know if your site has Facebook comments. Even if I saw them I would never comment using Facebook, the same as never using it to log-into a third party service. No need to give FB the opportunity to once again change their rules and share stuff I'd rather they not.
- jofo25 14y agoI think for an article or blog post, yea Facebook isn't that appropriate but most other places I find it useful for the pure fact that I can't really be bothered to make an account for every site I visit.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoI have a bunch of sites, and I've experimented with various options. (Example of one site with FB comments on: http://www.hn-books.com/Books/Slaughterhouse-Five.htm http://www.hn-books.com/Books/Slaughterhouse-Five.htm ) I've also tried LiveFyre comments and a few other systems. 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.
- showerst 14y agoI think a fair bit of it depends on your needs for moderation, and what you're comparing to. 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.
- memmullen 14y agoAs someone who reads ForeignPolicy.com every day, I wish you guys would use Disqus. Curious as to why you decided to go with LF over Disqus.
- showerst 14y agoI'm curious about what you dislike about LF. I could also explain our choices a bit, but I'd rather offline that. tim.showers@foreignpolicy.com
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoI have never used the Facebook Comment piece of a site for one reason: I don't want all the people reading THAT site to have a link right to my Facebook page. Under normal circumstances, the chances of some random stranger getting to me Facebook page are pretty slim. But if I comment on some article with Facebook, my real name is right there with a link to my page. The last thing I need it for some nut job to take issue with something I said and follow that link.
- derwiki 14y agoWe use the Facebook comment widget on almost all the pages on Causes.com. Two quick comments: - 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/comments/ 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.
- markkat 14y agoI have a FB account, but never comment with it. I don't want my every interaction on the web connected. I am getting tired of the social web.
- alttag 14y agoI don't particularly like the trend of sites offloading their commenting mechanisms to Twitter, Facebook, DISQUS, etc. If it's Facebook, I'll never see it, due to browser plugins. Twitter is often too short for a good conversation, but if you do use it, run a script to import/display related tweets instead of making me click. I'm not a fan of DISQUS either, partly because I use Ghostery. (Alhough, it's good that the new version has a quick "enable once and reload" feature.) 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.
- ed209 14y agoCommenting is something I'd much rather offload to someone like DISQUS. Creating your own commenting system either requires lots of spam management (for an open commenting system) or forcing users to register for your service before they can comment. 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.
- Gormo 14y agoI prefer just the opposite: I like having my identities on each site distinct and autonomous. If everyone has a common identity across multiple sites, it prevents any particular site from effectively evolving its own internal community and cultural norms, and raises the stakes of participation.
- dredmorbius 14y agoI segment my identities. A very few things will get my real name (or some variant of it). Most go under a generally-topical alias of some sort or another. I don't mind those aliases gathering their own reputation, but it's no major loss if I decide to toss one at a later point.
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- JumpCrisscross 14y agoSorely needed: "Why generalising from specific anecdotes is a bad idea for your life". 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.
- pytrin 14y agoThis was not a research paper, this was an opinion piece on Facebook comments
- sadga 14y agoWhy does someone who'se never used my site have an opinion on it?
- tolmasky 14y agoWell the article was actually mainly presented from the point of view of a commenter (as opposed to blog author). Notice all three points were about why he didn't like to comment via FB (vs. not liking to receive comments via FB). It was "I don't like commenting on FB, so you probably shouldn't use it" vs. "I have experienced less traffic when using FB comments, and thus am extrapolating that you might as well". 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?!".
- e12e 14y agoOn a related note: Does the site get a full copy of the comments? Can you do your own search, translate interesting discussions, go back years after facebook have changed their api, or cancelled your dev account, and read over an interesting discussion? 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.
- bentlegen 14y agoDepends on the website/publishing platform. Disqus's Wordpress plugin actually syncs all of the comments back to the site's WP database. So if they disable Disqus at a later date, all the comments are still there.
- jonchris 14y agoCreate separate FB account for professional use and commenting on websites. What's big deal?
- jonchris 14y agoCreate separate FB account for professional use and commenting on websites. What's big deal?
- mikeleeorg 14y agoHere's a slightly different perspective. 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.
- pytrin 14y agoOne of the commentators on my blog (I'm the author of the article), said that ever since TC changed to Facebook comments, he noticed a reduction in critical comments and changed the feel into a "Yes man" type discussions. I guess it depends on how you define quality comments - I prefer people voice their opinions without fear of repercussions. Obviously, this thinking is not appropriate for all cases - if you want product comments for example, by all means Facebook comments might provide the best type.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoFortunately, we haven't gotten any "Yes man" type discussions on our blog yet. Many of our most vocal commenters (who often state contrary opinions to ours) took to the Facebook Comment system well, though we've lost a few too. So far, none of the abusive trolls have come over yet. 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.
- MartinCron 14y agoI'd advise understanding your audience before deciding which comment system is best for your site. 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.
- andy_herbert 14y agoIn my opinion comments are a bad idea for your site, unless you're fortunate to have an exclusive audience. Yes, I am aware of the irony of this comment.