4 reasons not to have Facebook commenting on your website

I used to comment quite a bit at TechCrunch and a few other sites, but since they’ve adopted Facebook commenting on their articles, I’m avoiding leaving comments now.

Why? Well, there’s a huge advantage of Facebook comments in that they keep the conversation going; you get a notification via Facebook that someone’s replied to your comment, and that’s way less annoying than email notifications. Plus, you don’t have to sign up for an account on the site you’re commenting on. However, there are several other disadvantages…

1. The number of notifications

If you’re one of the first commenters on a TechCrunch article, you can expect a ton of Facebook notifications. I commented on a not-so-popular article a while back and ended up with about 30 notifications in total, spread out over a period of four or so days. As you can imagine, writing a quick comment in my lunchbreak on Monday, I didn’t expect to keep being brought back to the conversation by replies as late as Thursday…by which point it’s old news. Plus, you know, Facebook is all about interesting notifications from people you actually know and care about.

2. No URL field

I don’t want to link to my Facebook profile, I want to link to my actual website please. I want backlinks and potential visitors to my website, not people attempting to friend me on a closed Facebook profile. Adding an URL to the bottom of my comment would not only be irrelevant but make me look like a spammer – and being flagged as a spammer across Facebook would be really annoying.

3. Mandatory link to your Facebook profile

I continually get friend requests after I’ve posted on an article on a popular site using my Facebook login. I left ONE comment on one article and I’m a complete stranger with an extremely limited profile – why would you even want to friend me?? Oh, it’s because of my profile picture. Ok, I’ll change it to a picture that’s not of me. What’s that, you’re messaging me asking me what I look like? Seriously?

4. Job title

I don’t want my job title to be displayed next to my name, for the simple reason that my opinion is my own and no one else should be associated with it. Plus, it should be considered private as my Facebook settings are set to that if I remember rightly. This is more a Facebook issue than anything; job title should be an optional checkbox when you fill out a comment form on an external site. I could remove my job title from my Facebook profile, but why should I have to do that?

I should point out that I’m not one of those ZOMGPRIVACYWE’REALLGOINGTODIE, CORPORATIONSAREDESTROYINGOURSOULS type of people. I don’t really care that Google knows what sites I’ve visited in the same way I don’t really care that Sainsbury’s knows I buy a lot of hummous. What I do care about is how aspects of the internet are becoming closed off to those who don’t have Facebook or who don’t want non-friends visiting their profile. Facebook is making search engine optimisation harder, it’s making individuality harder and it’s strangling the internet to a scary extent. Facebook is part of my job and I’m on it every day, but keep Facebook on Facebook please. There are plenty of alternatives to Facebook commenting, including Disqus, WordPress’s built-in user registration and Livefyre for starters.