Facebook commenting

Although I hate Facebook, it's pretty much impossible to avoid it. Among its influence we have seen is the rise of a Facebook commenting system. This commenting system has given me exposure to how Facebook handles social interactions. This is yet another reason for me not to join up.

I think the rise of the Facebook commenting system is due to the number of people with Facebook accounts. A lot of people comment to various news articles that didn't seem interested before. Personally, I preferred fewer comments to look through posted in a format that actually works. Facebook has provided what could very well be the worst commenting system that I have encountered online.

One of the problems is that Facebook doesn't like to provide proper threads. You wind up with a handful of people who make initial comments, then people reply like crazy to each of them. When someone replies to a message, it's frequently displayed well after the post that convinced them to reply. Sometimes, they won't include the name of the person who is being responded to. When they do, they never show which specific post. This creates linear progression of lengthy conversations between numerous people without having any way of knowing who is being corrected, criticized, or in any other way referenced by a poster.

To make matters worse, posts seem to be deleted frequently without any acknowledgement of the original posts existence. I have seen insults aimed at people who don't seem to exist in the middle of unrelated discussions. This is another area where proper threading can help. If I don't know what an area of discussion is, I would like to skip it.

Another big problem with Facebook comments is the spam. Most of the time I read Facebook comments, I am flooded with such things as work-from-home advertisements. They are not only abundant, but there is no way to get rid of them. I don't even have a way of hiding them from display once I see them. With how big of a problem spam has become, there should be options for reporting spam even for non-members.

In the last year or so, commenting has deteriorated even further. Many sites no longer host comments. They don't even include the pathetic Facebook comments on their websites. For example, Komo no longer has commenting and expects visitors to head to Facebook to read the comments there. I hate the idea that the only way to find people correcting the media (as well as numerous insults, the spam problem, and other types of irrelevant posts) is to leave the websites and visit a specific third party.

Facebook was clearly not designed with commenting in mind. It's a shame that so many sites rely on such a flawed approach. The transition from hosted commenting to Facebook is clearly an area of regress that the online community is currently facing. We desperately need something better right now.