Commenters, We Want You Back
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It was early 2011 and TechCrunch’s comment section was overrun with trolls. Bullies were drowning out our smart commenters. We hated our commenters because, well, they hated us. So we Facebook Comments in an attempt to silence the trolls — by removing their anonymity.
But we eventually discovered that our anti-troll tactic worked too well; The bullies left our comments sections, but so did everyone else. Now, several years later, after dozens of endless meetings and conference calls, we’ve decided we’re going to try out Livefyre instead of Facebook Comments.
Frankly, our trial with Facebook Comments lasted way too long at too steep of a cost. Sure, Facebook Comments drove extra traffic to the site, but the vast majority of our readers clearly do not feel the system is worthy of their interaction.
And we want our commenters back.
Livefyre offers the best mix of commenting and admin tools currently available, and our developers stand behind it. Some sites have killed comments altogether, turning instead to Twitter and aggregators for user interaction. But we want your feedback. We want to know what you think about an article. Call out our typos, join the discussion, give us counterpoints — just don’t be a dick. Remember, Elin is always lurking in the comments with her banhammer ready.
There are bound to be bugs at launch. Let me apologize for those now. But to us, a buggy Livefyre launch, with lots of you using it and breaking it, is still better than Facebook Comments.
What you will be doing:
TechCrunch Profiles
- You will now be creating “TechCrunch” accounts where you can sign in socially and all of your comments will be tracked on your profile screen, which is launched by clicking on a username. This means you can maintain your anonymity, but there is still accountability as your comments are all attached to one profile.
- You will have the option to edit your own profile at any time and edit notifications. Just hover over your username. You will see the options there.
How it works:
Livefyre features
- Post comments in real-time for everyone to see, and have a live discussion right on our site.
- Easily format your post to express your opinions with rich text like bold, italic, lists, and more.
- Click or Type “@” in the comment box to tag users in the conversations and your friends from Facebook or Twitter. Personalize the message you share to their wall or send in an @reply to include them in the discussion.
- Links containing “http” will automatically be hyperlinked; YouTube videos, Flickr images, and other media from across the web will automatically be embedded in the comment stream, playable inline and all.
- Share your comment to Facebook and Twitter clicking the icons next to the “Post Comment As” button.
- If you hover over the time-stamp, you’ll reveal a few options: delete your comment, “flag” other’s comments as Offensive, Spam, Off-topic, or Disagree, and share any comment to Facebook and Twitter or get the permalink to the comment.
- See that little notifier pop-up in the right hand corner? That is a live update of new comments on the page, displaying the user’s comment and avatar. Your view won’t move until you click on the bubble, which scroll and reveal the new comments.
- You’ll also see us using the LiveBlog to report the stories that you care about most in real-time. Our editors will post content as a story unfolds, and users can like, share, and reply to any post to spur conversations about the best events and interact directly with other users talking about the same moment.
- You will now be creating “TechCrunch” accounts where you can sign in socially and all of your comments will be tracked on your profile screen, which is launched by clicking on a username. This means you can maintain your anonymity, but there is still accountability as your comments are all attached to one profile.
- You will have the option to edit your own profile at any time and edit notifications. Just hover over your username. You will see the options there.
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