Facebook Comments Vs Disqus: Thoughts on 3rd party commenting platforms
The image above is what I see when I read techcrunch here in Asia, ironically, the blog post's topic was centered on facebook comments. If you are currently in China, Vietnam, or a host of countries in the Middle East, you would see the same thing.
The image seen above is also the reason for my post on commenting platforms here today, as it also illustrates one of the primary problems ignored by my blogs and websites using the facebook commenting platform. A lot of people can't see it or use it. So you are essentially limiting the level of interactivity of your user-base to western nations. I thought I would point this out first since it seems to be a a significant issue which has been largely ignored.
Sometimes there is a benefit to having less notoriety. Disqus is a perfect example of this because another blog I frequent is dealbreaker. Dealbreaker uses disqus's 3rd party commenting platform and I can read all the comments normally unlike techcrunch which just shows the error seen above.
The Big Picture: Facebook Comments vs Disqus (One Identity vs Partitioned Online Identities)
The blog post from which I pulled the facebook comment error message from was about facebook comments as I mentioned previously. The techcrunch contributor made critical comments, among them:
I’ll grudgingly grant that there has been one giant benefit: the army of trolls who used to plague TechCrunch have been reduced to a tiny grunting handful (most of whom log in with fake Yahoo accounts) thanks to Facebook’s insistence on real names. I actually even had mixed emotions about this - but I can’t deny that the overall level of conversation has gone up a notch as a direct result.
This brings another issue to the forefront. Facebook comments limits the dubris comments, but it also limits people to using only one identity to comment. There are good reasons why people would want to comment either anonymously or under separate identity. Techcrunch contributors bring up trolls and whether or not they add value to the conversation.
What these debates have ignored is that insightful commentators may stop posting who are not trolls, or even necessarily critical in their commenting. For instance, a poster might be a CEO that does business who the company at hand being critiqued as well as one of its competitors. In a scenario such as this, the hypothetical CEO might not comment to even give positive opinions (because doing so might have an adverse effect on the the company's relationship with the competitor).
Many thoughtful community members will simply leave who are not trolls. Earlier I mentioned the finance focused dealbreaker blog. Over there, if they switched over to facebook comments, they would probably lose 99% of their active posters. Too much is at stake reputation wise, which doesn't justify the risk (however minimal) of making a public post.
The only people who will make public posts using the facebook comments platform are people who have nothing to lose (career wise) from making public posts. If you want an engaged, intelligent community - facebook comments would have an adverse effect. Only the lowest common denominator of the tech community will post, which reduces the insight that can be gleaned from debates and comments relevant to the article. I see large instances of this already since techcrunch implemented the techcrunch platform.
Only people who big mouths who don't know what they are talking about comment. The trolls are gone, but the insiders are also gone from the commenting scene. The end result is that techcrunch is now left with non-knowledgeable posters and self-promotional users who spam advertisements about their companies.
The common paradigm of troll (more posts, increased debate) vs no trolls (more relevant, friendlier posts) is completely flawed. The entire debate is focused on the wrong issue. The issue at hand when considering using facebook vs. a 3rd party platform like disqus is one identity vs multiple identities. Namely, as a website or a community, do you think it is better to have people who use only one identity (most likely with less to lose or too dumb to not know any better) vs a community with anonymous contributors (which means more trolling, but also allows for more ideas by people who know what they are talking about - but might have something to lose through public comments).
If you choose the first option, these are the comments you lose:
people who work for the company discussed will stop posting (except maybe the PR people). You lose all possibility of people w operational experience on the ground floor commenting
people affiliated with the company directly or indirectly
people not directly related to, but whom have professional relationships that intersect with the company being discussed
I would say that those people are a lot more valuable, even at the cost of having trolls post (who can be ignored anyways).