3 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  As 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 ago
    I'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

showerst 14y ago

I 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 ago
As 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 ago
  I'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