Why Facebook comments is a bad idea for your site

http://www.techfounder.net/2012/08/15/dont-mix-business-and-personal-why-facebook-comments-is-a-bad-idea-for-your-site/

by pytrin • 14 years ago

98 86 14 years ago

Title: "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!

pytrin3• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Facebook comments are also bad for your viewers who don't have Facebook... Me for example.

xqyz3• 14 years ago

Indeed. Even if I had, I doubt I would care to sign in just to post a comment.

LoganCale• 14 years ago

And viewers who block the Facebook domain in /etc/hosts.

chimi2• 14 years ago

I also block disqus and have noticed a lack of comments increasing over time, which really isn't a problem at all...

gdilla3• 14 years ago

I think one advantage of FB comments is that it supposedly cuts down on trolls, spam, and stupid arguments.

asdfologist• 14 years ago

You must be new to FB.

xqyz3• 14 years ago

Or to the internet in general.

juridatenshi• 14 years ago

That's not been my experience. One of the local papers recently changed their site to have FB comments. I can't believe the bigoted garbage and trolling I've seen people post on there with their name and picture attached to it.

illuminate• 14 years ago

In my experience, since they don't have the barrier to create and manage a separate account, and since they're not posting on their "friends" page, they're more likely to post stupid arguments and flamebait.

Too• 14 years ago

I think it stops interesting conversations because everybody goes into the "i agree!" politically correct mode when they have their real name on the signature.

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.

dannylum• 14 years ago

+1 gdilla, I completely agree with you. It also gives context behind who the commenter so I can make judgement whether to trust the author or not. This is one of the primary reasons I like use Quora (over Yahoo Answers w/ fake avatars) and read the replies to questions because I feel like that it's a real person with a real identity who is talking. Sites that use FB create effective barriers that bridges the gap between the offline and online world.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

It's also bad SEO-wise. User generated content can help you with long tail rankings

Kiro• 14 years ago

Facebook comments are crawled.

franze3• 14 years ago

if 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.

thinkingisfun4• 14 years ago

What 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.

lucian303• 14 years ago

It alienates those of us without a facebook account.

trueneverland4• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Isn't that an argument in favour of using Facebook? One account for the whole web, rather than one for each individual blog.

thinkingisfun4• 14 years ago

No, 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.

trueneverland4• 14 years ago

I prefer name and comment, no registration system

danielweber• 14 years ago

Isn'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.

trueneverland4• 14 years ago

You assume every site uses either of those two. The reason I made the comment I made is because I keep running into unique systems

mandeepj• 14 years ago

It's optional to share your comment on your news feed so I don't know why author is hating FB comments.

crusso• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

Well 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.

franze3• 14 years ago

i 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."

thinkingisfun4• 14 years ago

"compared to old wordpress-standard-installations"

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.

chimi2• 14 years ago

Context is everything. Your method is great for low traffic sites. Sites with higher traffic are harder to block, because spammers specifically modify the robots to scrape the number and input it.

DanielOcean• 14 years ago

I think it's just the vocal minority here voicing their opinion. Franze you mention all great points with data to back it up (I've noticed the same fwiw).

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??

dredmorbius2• 14 years ago

Your 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.

franze3• 14 years ago

as 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.

alpb• 14 years ago

I 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-...

brudgers• 14 years ago

IMO, a Facebook account shouldn't be a prerequisite for any action on the internet other than using Facebook.

PCheese• 14 years ago

You 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/comme...

droithomme2• 14 years ago

That 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.

jonknee2• 14 years ago

I 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.

tolos• 14 years ago

I did not know about this plugin before now. I almost feel like I can start reading political articles on news websites again. Thanks!

jonknee2• 14 years ago

The lack of Like buttons is also a blast of fresh air.

jofo25• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

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 ) 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.

showerst2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

jack-r-abbit• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

We 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/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• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

I 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.

ed2092• 14 years ago

Commenting 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.

Gormo2• 14 years ago

I 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.

mnicole• 14 years ago

I guess I don't really understand this, because I see just as much - if not more - spam in DISQUS discussions. Making it easier to moderate is nice, but someone needs to actively bother to do so.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Disqus does not work for me as it requires third party cookies which I have disabled...

bentlegen5• 14 years ago

The new version of Disqus works without 3rd party cookies in all browsers.

Gormo2• 14 years ago

Disqus also has very poor facilities for searching, filtering, and sorting discussion threads. On more than one occasion, I've attempted to revisit a thread I'd participated in earlier, to see if there'd been any new replies, only to be completely stymied in my attempt to locate the specific comments I was looking for, due to a slow UI, mandatory pagination, and a lack of any internal search function.

curtismch2• 14 years ago

Disqus is terrible. I like to comment with different email addresses for work/personal stuff and Disqus makes that hard.

bentlegen5• 14 years ago

What do we do that makes having multiple accounts difficult? Genuinely interested in your feedback.

ed2092• 14 years ago

Don't they have multiple options for "Post As"?

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Sounds like an interesting pitch for branch.com. :)

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.

Otto422• 14 years ago

Agreed. If I see a third party commenting system, I typically just close the tab instead of leaving a comment. It's not worth the hassle to me to deal with whatever your commenting system requires.

Name/email/url. These three simple fields make it easy. Don't make me try to figure out how to talk back to you.

thetylerhayes2• 14 years ago

Not sure if you were directing that us as well, but either way just wanted to clarify: we (Disqus) actually do offer guest commenting functionality by default. You can continue commenting similarly as you do on any non-third-party system by simply not logging in to an account when posting a comment.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

Sorely 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.

pytrin3• 14 years ago

This was not a research paper, this was an opinion piece on Facebook comments

sadga• 14 years ago

Why does someone who'se never used my site have an opinion on it?

e12e• 14 years ago

On 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.

bentlegen5• 14 years ago

Depends 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.

mikeleeorg2• 14 years ago

Here'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.

pytrin3• 14 years ago

One 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.

mikeleeorg2• 14 years ago

Fortunately, 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• 14 years ago

I'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• 14 years ago

In 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.

Why Facebook comments is a bad idea for your site

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