Editor’s note: Jordan Kretchmer is the founder of Livefyre, a realtime commenting and conversation platform for publishers and online communities. He doesn’t think much of Facebook comments. In this guest post, he explains why.
I’m not gonna lie, I hate Facebook Comments. It’s not just because it competes with my company’s product (though I’m sure that has something to do with it). It goes much deeper than that. And I am not alone.
Whether you’re a casual blogger or the owner of a major tech site like this one, it’s likely that you’ve recently begun to think a lot more about the comments system on your site.
Blog comments have been around since 1997 (or earlier, if you count Usenet, or various more primordial forms of online diary-keeping). But, never have comments been as important, or contested, as they are today, especially as Facebook charges into the space with its updated comment widget.
If you’re like us, you’re trying to keep up with the frequent reports from the field about which sites are switching to Facebook Comments (like TechCrunch) and what their respective communities think about it. The bulk of the debate centers on whether or not to replace Disqus with Facebook Comments, or the feature war that in almost all cases misses the point entirely.
I’m a bit biased, I admit, but I think we have to look beyond the feature-set of Facebook to grasp the impact that one line of javascript could have on a site’s community, and more importantly the entire web.
This post tries to unpack the many places where Facebook fails those who adopt the commenting platform as a cure-all to bring community back to their content. (And kudos to TechCrunch for not shying away from this debate. I hope you weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments below, even though you will have to log into Facebook to do so).
Facebook Ignores the Interest Graph
Facebook Comments approaches online identity and discussion from a perspective that doesn’t (and won’t) align with the interests of publishers or commenters.
Conversations around the web are built on the interest graph, not the social graph. By making the assumption that I want my 800 Facebook friends in every conversation I participate in online, it forces me to combine all of my interest groups and all of my friend groups into one giant bucket. While that social segmentation worked for my college Facebook network back in the day, it broke down the day my mom could join that network, along with my sister’s friends and the guy that beat me up in middle school.
I can choose who I include in different discussions in real life. Why shouldn’t I have that control on the web too? What happens, and this has been proven out on numerous sites, is that interaction rates drop dramatically when Facebook comments get installed.
The issue of conversation context is related to this, and deserves a post on its own. Suffice it to say that personal comments from private Facebook pages don’t make sense in the context of a conversation on a publisher site. This random comment intrusion damages the value and quality of conversations by reducing commentary to one-line personal banter between two or three friends.
It also goes the other way around; random comments appearing unbeknownst in your Facebook feed will confuse more than it will engage others. While Facebook allows you to opt out of that, it’s checked by default, and the option to deselect it isn’t even presented to you on replies to comments. Sneaky tactic.
Facebook Over-Prioritizes Silencing Trolls
Facebook Comments hones in on trolling by forcing real identity, but the end result isn’t just the silencing of trolls, it’s the silencing of everyone. If you’ve followed the interminable trolls versus no trolls debate, you know exactly what this means. Anonymous commenters are lumped into the all-encompassing evil troll bucket.
But the truth is that there are good trolls, and there are bad ones. The good ones spark engaging dialogue and encourage the development of amazing content. We have to find the balance between utter silence, and allowing for important contribution. One thing is for sure, using Facebook Comments to kill trolls is like trying to kill a fly with a boulder. The result will be way more destructive than just letting the fly buzz around and eventually, go away.
Facebook Wants Your Data. Badly.
Publishers who have chosen to hand over their entire communities to Facebook are likewise choosing to give up the entire value of their community. What this means is that they no longer have any data on loyal commenters, and no email addresses, which means no ability to communicate with them again. They’re no longer your users, they’re Facebook’s.
You’re giving a huge strategic and valuable asset to Facebook. They understand the inherent value of comments and community, and are attempting to take it out from underneath publishers before they even realize what’s happened. And we’re back to where we started—publishers don’t quite understand the value of their communities yet.
Why not just redirect www.techcrunch.com to www.facebook/techcrunch then?
Any publisher would find that absurd, because they know for sure that their content has value—and they’ll never hand that over to anyone else.
Don’t Throw in the Towel
As a publisher or blogger of any size, creating an active and engaged community isn’t something that you have to do alone. There are plenty of companies building tools that foster better conversations. Just remember that focusing on the people in your community will make your site more valuable, without giving that community away to Facebook.
Website: livefyre.com
Founded: December, 2009
Funding: $800k
Livefyre is an embeddable live commenting and conversation platform that replaces your legacy commenting system. We’re rethinking how conversations across the entire web work by building a system that makes every conversation online aware of every other conversation’s existence. This allows conversations around the web to share data, and creates a massive central pipeline of high quality conversation and commentary. Even better, we’re doing it all in real-time, which means instantaneous comment posts, lighting fast search of conversations happening around the web, and a powerful recommendation engine that drives traffic to your site’s content simply based on the topics you post about.
In addition to shifting the thinking about how conversations happen online in general, Livefyre is introducing a number of firsts into the conversation ecosystem, including conversation check-ins, real-time game mechanics, and a revolutionary moderation and reputation system.
In addition to shifting the thinking about how conversations happen online in general, Livefyre is introducing a number of firsts into the conversation ecosystem, including conversation check-ins, real-time game mechanics, and a revolutionary moderation and reputation system.
Website: disqus.com
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: May 5, 2007
Funding: $500k
Disqus (formerly Big Head Labs) is a networked community platform, reaching over 200 million people a month, hundreds of thousands of registered communities, and millions of active commenters. The service offers a networked comment system used to foster engagement and connect audiences from around the web.Disqus looks to make it very easy and rewarding for people to interact on websites using its system. Commenters can build reputation and carry their contributions from one website to the next. Using the Disqus’ built-in network effects, bloggers and publishers can expect a higher volume and higher quality of conversations by using the comment system.
Disqus was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason to extract the best characteristics of successful online communities and apply them on any blog, website, or application.
Website: js-kit.com
Location: United States
Funding: $4.8M
JS-Kit makes simple widgets that add interactivity to websites and blogs. Their stable of widgets includes one for commenting, rating, polling and rating comments. They also have a widget called Top Rated that tracks the highest rated objects on your site.
Each of the widgets can be easily installed on your site free of charge with only a few lines of Javascript code. And, each of the widgets can be customized to match your site’s theme.
JS-Kit offers the widgets free (ad-supported) or for a monthly fee users can get the widgets ad-free. Competitors include KickApps, Intense Debate, CoComment and Tangler.
Each of the widgets can be easily installed on your site free of charge with only a few lines of Javascript code. And, each of the widgets can be customized to match your site’s theme.
JS-Kit offers the widgets free (ad-supported) or for a monthly fee users can get the widgets ad-free. Competitors include KickApps, Intense Debate, CoComment and Tangler.
Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded: February 1, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term Facebook came from Zuckerberg’s high school (Phillips Exeter Academy). The Exeter Face Book was passed around to every student as a way for students to get to know their classmates for the following year. It was a physical paper book until Zuckerberg brought it to the internet.
With this success, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and Hughes moved out to Palo Alto for the summer and rented a sublet. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg ran into the former cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker. Parker soon moved in to Zuckerberg’s apartment and they began working together. Parker provided the introduction to their first investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of The Founders Fund. Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook.
With millions more users, Friendster attempted to acquire the company for $10 million in mid 2004. Facebook turned down the offer and subsequently received $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners, at a valuation of around $100 million. Facebook continued to grow, opening up to high school students in September 2005 and adding an immensely popular photo sharing feature the next month. The next spring, Facebook received $25 million in funding from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as previous investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The pre-money valuation for this deal was about $525 million. Facebook subsequently opened up to work networks, eventually amassing over 20,000 work networks. Finally in September 2006, Facebook opened to anyone with an email address.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire the company for $1 billion dollars. Reports actually indicated that Zuckerberg made a verbal agreement to sell Facebook to Yahoo. A few days later when Yahoo’s stock price took a dive, the offer was lowered to $800 million and Zuckerberg walked away from the deal. Yahoo later offered $1 billion again, this time Zuckerberg turned Yahoo down and earned instant notoriety as the “kid” who turned down a billion. This was not the first time Zuckerberg turned down an acquisition offer; Viacom had previously unsuccessfully attempted to acquire the company for $750 million in March, 2006.
One sour note for Facebook has been the controversy with social network ConnectU. The founders of ConnectU, former classmates of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, allege that Zuckerberg stole their original source code for Facebook. The ordeal has gone to court, and has now been resolved.
Notwithstanding this lingering controversy, Facebook’s growth in the fall of 2007 was staggering. Over 1 million new users signed up every week, 200,000 daily, totaling over 50 million active users. Facebook received 40 billion page views a month. Long gone were the days of Facebook as a social network for college students. 11% of users are over the age of 35, and the fastest growing demographic is users over 30. Facebook has also seen huge growth internationally; 15% of the user base is in Canada. Facebook users’ passion, or addiction, to the site is unparalleled: more than half use the product every single day and users spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook. Facebook is 6th most trafficked site in the US and top photo sharing site with 4.1 billion photos uploaded.
Based on these types of numbers, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook for 1.6 percent of the company in October 2007. This meant a valuation of over $15 billion, making Facebook the 5th most valuable US Internet company, yet with only $150 million in annual revenue. Many explained Microsoft’s decision as being solely driven by the desire to outbid Google.
Facebook’s competitors include MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Piczo, and Open Social.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term Facebook came from Zuckerberg’s high school (Phillips Exeter Academy). The Exeter Face Book was passed around to every student as a way for students to get to know their classmates for the following year. It was a physical paper book until Zuckerberg brought it to the internet.
With this success, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and Hughes moved out to Palo Alto for the summer and rented a sublet. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg ran into the former cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker. Parker soon moved in to Zuckerberg’s apartment and they began working together. Parker provided the introduction to their first investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of The Founders Fund. Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook.
With millions more users, Friendster attempted to acquire the company for $10 million in mid 2004. Facebook turned down the offer and subsequently received $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners, at a valuation of around $100 million. Facebook continued to grow, opening up to high school students in September 2005 and adding an immensely popular photo sharing feature the next month. The next spring, Facebook received $25 million in funding from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as previous investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The pre-money valuation for this deal was about $525 million. Facebook subsequently opened up to work networks, eventually amassing over 20,000 work networks. Finally in September 2006, Facebook opened to anyone with an email address.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire the company for $1 billion dollars. Reports actually indicated that Zuckerberg made a verbal agreement to sell Facebook to Yahoo. A few days later when Yahoo’s stock price took a dive, the offer was lowered to $800 million and Zuckerberg walked away from the deal. Yahoo later offered $1 billion again, this time Zuckerberg turned Yahoo down and earned instant notoriety as the “kid” who turned down a billion. This was not the first time Zuckerberg turned down an acquisition offer; Viacom had previously unsuccessfully attempted to acquire the company for $750 million in March, 2006.
One sour note for Facebook has been the controversy with social network ConnectU. The founders of ConnectU, former classmates of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, allege that Zuckerberg stole their original source code for Facebook. The ordeal has gone to court, and has now been resolved.
Notwithstanding this lingering controversy, Facebook’s growth in the fall of 2007 was staggering. Over 1 million new users signed up every week, 200,000 daily, totaling over 50 million active users. Facebook received 40 billion page views a month. Long gone were the days of Facebook as a social network for college students. 11% of users are over the age of 35, and the fastest growing demographic is users over 30. Facebook has also seen huge growth internationally; 15% of the user base is in Canada. Facebook users’ passion, or addiction, to the site is unparalleled: more than half use the product every single day and users spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook. Facebook is 6th most trafficked site in the US and top photo sharing site with 4.1 billion photos uploaded.
Based on these types of numbers, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook for 1.6 percent of the company in October 2007. This meant a valuation of over $15 billion, making Facebook the 5th most valuable US Internet company, yet with only $150 million in annual revenue. Many explained Microsoft’s decision as being solely driven by the desire to outbid Google.
Facebook’s competitors include MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Piczo, and Open Social.
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