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Tag: comments

  • Googler Tweets About Comments’ Impact On Search Ranking

    Googler Tweets About Comments’ Impact On Search Ranking

    In case you’re interested in the latest on how Google views the comments on your content, Google’s Gary Illyes (a webmaster trends analyst) provided some insight in a conversation on Twitter.

    Hat tip to Search Engine Roundtable for highlighting the conversation between Illyes and Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post fame:

    Of course a “healthy” and “thriving” community in comments means good moderation. Too often, spammers and trolls ruin this, so if you can’t keep things “healthy,” there’s a chance your comments could actually hurt your pages in Google’s eyes.

    Like Illeys said, it “feeds into general quality”.

  • Google Docs, Sheets & Slides Just Got A Lot Better On Mobile

    Google jus announced that it is finally adding mobile comments to Docs, Sheets and Slides.

    The announcement came in the form of a cute little anecdote about chocolate cake. From the Google Docs Blog:

    When Jim, one of the engineers on the Google Slides team, brought a zucchini chocolate cake into the office last week, we knew we had to get the recipe. So we asked him and his wife, Alison, to let us in on the family secret—just in time for Chocolate Cake Day. They worked together in Slides (mobile commenting across Google Docs just launched today!) to perfect the recipe. Alison writes:

    Growing up, my grandma made zucchini chocolate cake often, especially when there was a surplus of zucchinis at the local farmer’s market. The cake is ridiculously moist and pairs well with many different frostings, though cream cheese is my favorite. Thanks to mobile commenting, Jim and I went back and forth on the recipe—Jim on his Nexus 9, me on my iPhone—until we had it just right.

    The scenario is even demonstrated in a video so you can see how the functionality works.

    Google gives an overview of comments and discussions in the Docs editors help center here.

    Image via YouTube

  • Facebook Tests Showing Your Friends When You’re Typing A Comment

    Facebook Tests Showing Your Friends When You’re Typing A Comment

    Facebook is currently running a test that shows people when their friends are actually typing a comment to their post. This way, you know when someone is responding even before they finish their response.

    TheNextWeb confirmed the test with the company, which gave them the following statement:

    “News Feed is a place to stay up to date with your friends and family. We’ve heard from people that they want their experience on Facebook to reflect the real time conversations they have. So we are testing adding a line above the comment box of a post that indicates when a friend is typing. This is to help people have real-time conversations with friends and family.”

    This is pretty much how Facebook Messenger already works. When you’re having a conversation with someone, you can see when they’re typing. It can help let you know if you need to stick around in the dialog for a second or move along to something else. It’s pretty useful in that sense.

    On the other hand, is this something we really need when it comes to commenting on a post? Facebook posts aren’t quite the real time experience that a private discussion is. Various people will see a post throughout the course of the day as they scroll through their News Feed.

    Some people don’t really like the idea of people knowing when they’re typing a comment, and find it “creepy”.

    People do begin comments and then change their minds. This must happen all the time. Now, you have to worry about looking like an ass in such a case.

    It remains to be seen if this will become a standard feature. Time will tell.

  • New Data Shows Importance Of Facebook Shares Over Likes And Comments

    New Data Shows Importance Of Facebook Shares Over Likes And Comments

    When it comes to your Facebook posts, shares appear to be significantly more important than either likes or comments when it comes to increasing your reach and audience.

    Have you found shares to be more effective at increasing your posts’ reach than likes? Let us know in the comments.

    That is the key finding from some recently released research by Socialbakers, which says it is now able to demonstrate that shares directly correlate with viral reach more than any other kind of interaction.

    Here are a couple of graphs that do just that, looking at both media and brand posts:

    Optimized-Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 10.53.31 AM

    Viral reach, by the way, refers to those who saw a story in their News Feed or Ticker only because of one or more of their friends interacted with it.

    According to the findings, there’s a 72% chance that if a Facebook user sees a Media post referred from a Facebook friend interacting with it, the interaction was a comment, but if that person shared it, the percentage goes up to 99.8%. The numbers for brand pages are 28% for comments and 94% for shares.

    “Another major finding from our research is that most unique Media impressions come from viral reach – and from their posts being shared,” says Socialbakers social media analyst Phillip Ross. “This fits the general pattern we see in our Promoted Post Detection tool (an exclusive component of our social media analytics tool), that almost all Media engagement is organic. Now, we know that this organic engagement almost certainly comes from content being shared. But for Brands, it’s not the same story. Shares only correlate 55% with unique impressions for Brand posts.”

    “Strangely enough, Likes correlate most strongly with overall Brand post impressions,” he adds. “This phenomenon happens for a more obvious reason than it may seem: there are simply more Likes happening to the average Brand post than there are Shares. Keep in mind there’s still a very high correlation between Shares and unique viral impressions – but because viral impressions only make up 6% of all Brand impressions, most Brand post impressions that come from social referrals will come from Likes. The lesson here is clear: To get friends of your target audience to see your branded content – and to get the broadest reach possible on Facebook – your content must be shareable.”

    Socialbakers also shared this video of its executive chairman talking about engagement data of publishers, which the firm says brands should be looking to for inspiration when it comes to shareable content.

    The advice here essentially amounts to following BuzzFeed and Business Insider to see how to do content for social media.

    A Facebook spokesperson was recently quoted as saying, “Over the past two years, we’ve seen referral traffic to publishers from Facebook grow significantly, nearly across the board. As the number of posts to Facebook has increased substantially over the past few months, there has been a corresponding increase in the amount of potential posts to show any one person, which impacts reach. In this newly competitive landscape, we’re seeing results vary by publisher: some are experiencing continued growth in referral traffic while others have seen declines. On the whole, referrals to the top 1,000 publishers are at the same level today as they were in January.”

    Clearly, businesses need to be creating content that people want to share with others, and should be going out of their way to encourage people to do just that. Does your content only display Facebook’s like button and not the share button? That’s a good place to start.

    We recently looked at some findings indicating that short and sweet Facebook posts tend to drive more traffic to websites. More on that here.

    Do you focus on getting shares over likes? Do you post content that emulates that of the media? Discuss.

    Images via Facebook, Socialbakers

  • Google Is Stripping Google+ from Its Services – First Up, YouTube

    Google Is Stripping Google+ from Its Services – First Up, YouTube

    A few years ago, Google went all in with Google+. Google+ is Google, remember? In an effort to unify all Google products under a common banner, Google tied everything to Google+ – including YouTube. This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move.

    Google+, as we all know, didn’t really turn out how Google envisioned. Whether you want to call Google+ dead, or dying, or niche, or whatever – it doesn’t really matter. Google knows it’s dead. Today, Google made another move to extricate Google+ from its actually popular products – of which there are many.

    Google has announced that it is unlinking Google+ and YouTube, and will continue to unlink Google+ from other services in the coming months.

    “When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes.” says Google+ head Bradley Horowitz.

    “We’ll also move some features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience out of Google+. For example, many elements of Google+ Photos have been moved into the new Google Photos app, and we’re well underway putting location sharing into Hangouts and other apps, where it really belongs. We think changes like these will lead to a more focused, more useful, more engaging Google+.”

    First up is YouTube.

    “In the coming weeks, YouTube will no longer require a Google+ profile when you want to upload, comment, or create a channel,” says the YouTube team.

    All you’ll need is a regular old Google account (not a public Google+ profile), just like the old days.

    Google will eventually give users an easy way to remove their Google+ profiles from YouTube.

    “If you’re happy with everything as it is now, then just keep on keepin’ on. If you want to remove your Google+ profile, you’ll be able to do this in the coming months, but do not do it now or you’ll delete your YouTube channel,” says Google.

    As Google said when it announced a kill date for Google+ photos last week, Google+ has shifted its focus to connecting people with shared interests.

    “Google+ is quickly becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them. In line with that focus, we’re continuing to add new features like Google+ Collections, where you can share and enjoy posts organized by the topics you care about,” says Horowitz.

    That sound you hear is a chorus of YouTube users, rejoicing.

  • Kid Reads Hateful YouTube Comments to Show How Bullying Affects People

    Kid Reads Hateful YouTube Comments to Show How Bullying Affects People

    YouTube is a wonderful thing – arguably one of the top three most important websites in history. YouTube comments, on the other hand, are a cesspool.

    Sometimes it’s easy to look at the trolling, the virtiol, and the downright stupidity being spewed beneath any given video and think hey, everyone knows it’s YouTube. Nobody actually takes any of it seriously.

    But you know, trolling or not, things hurt people. Especially if you’re 11.

    A kid named Logan is making the viral rounds with a short video he made with the help of his dad. In the video, Logan reads a bunch of YouTube comments he’s received on his videos. No, they aren’t even close to some of the worst shit that gets thrown around YouTube, but listening to him read them is pretty heartbreaking.

    Check it out:

    I winced as I scrolled down to see the top comment on this video …

    Fuck you, cyber bullies.

    Maybe there’s some hope for us after all.

  • Your Facebook Comments Plugin Is About To Get An Update

    Facebook is getting ready to thrust its new Comments plugin upon users who haven’t taken the initiative to update it themselves. The new plugin was unveiled at the company’s F8 developers conference earlier this year, and comes with some new bells and whistles.

    The most interesting part about the new version is that it syncs comments between content on your website and that same content as shared on your Facebook page.

    Facebook product manager Varun Bhartia said in a blog post:

    This week, we will be updating all previous versions of the Comments Plugin to v2.3 that was announced at F8. This new version includes a refreshed Comments Moderation Tool with new UI, layout, and better spam controls, as well as changes on the Comments front end such as a cleaner design to make the plugin compatible with more sites and optimized for mobile.

    This update will happen automatically, so your app/site will have the benefit of the plugin’s new, updated look and functionality without any work required to make the change.

    You can get a better look at what the new plugin has to offer in our coverage from March.

    You can find the documentation for the plugin here.

    Image via Facebook

  • YouTube Is Giving Creators 10 Helpful New Features

    YouTube Is Giving Creators 10 Helpful New Features

    Google announced a list of ten new features that are coming soon to help YouTube Creators. Some will become available over the coming weeks, and others may take a bit longer, but they’re all expected to be available this year. That’s about as specific as Google is getting on the releasing at this point.

    For now, let’s get to the features.

    1. Comments

    YouTube is promising big improvements to the commenting system. In fact, they’re going so far as to say that the new system leads to a 30% drop in the rate of dislikes. The improvements will come by way of a better ranking system, which is supposed to reduce the visibility of “junk comments”.

    I guess we’ll see how that goes. The last time Google made major changes to the YouTube commenting system it didn’t go over too well. This sounds like a step in the right direction though.

    2. Subscriber Notifications

    This one should be as good for users as it is for creators. Google is going to give creators a new way for fans to opt in to get mobile and email notifications every time the channel publishes a new video.

    “Your fans don’t want to miss out on videos from their favorite creators–and neither do we,” says Matt Glotzbach, VP, Product Management at YouTube.

    3. Easier access to the subscriptions feed

    They’re also making it easier to get to the Subscriptions feed in the mobile app. The company says this will make it easier for your subscribers to stay on top of your latest videos.

    4. A Better Creator Studio App

    Google is promising major improvements to the Creator Studio app, which will give creators more insight about what’s happening on their channel. It will also provide notifications.

    5. Better Management

    The app will get new video management features such as the ability to update thumbnails from your phone as well as the ability to enable or disable monetization on your videos.

    6. New Card Types

    Google will be launching new Card types that will help you promote your other content, sell merchandise, raise funds, etc. For one, there will be a Channel card to link your videos to other channels.

    7. 3D 360° videos

    Google showed off its 360° videos a while back, and this year, it’s planning on “adding 3D to the mix”.

    8. Livestream Improvements

    “We just made it easier for you to set up and manage your live streams. And where better to show them off than in our upcoming YouTube Gaming app?” says Glotzbach.

    9. New Community

    There will be a new YouTube Creator Community forum designed to help creators find collaborators, share advice, and give Google feedback.

    10. Creator Academy Update

    Finally, they’re going to launch improvements to the Creator Academy, which has over 50 lessons for learning on how to get more out of YouTube. They’re making it easier to search and personalize your experience.

    Listen to YouTube staff talk more about the new features here:

    While you may have to wait a bit for some of this stuff, the company says it’s listening, so if you have something to say, let it be known on Google+ or Twitter.

    Image via YouTube

  • Facebook Is Testing Its Reply to Comments Feature on Personal Profiles

    UPDATED WITH COMMENT FROM FACEBOOK

    Facebook appears to be rolling out its reply to comment feature site wide, allowing users to start threaded comments on personal profiles’ posts.

    For two years, this feature has only been available for pages with 10,000+ likes.

    The option to reply to comments only appears on statuses and photos posted directly to Facebook. Cross-posted content, like photos from Instagram, do not currently give users the option to reply directly to comments.

    Facebook first introduced replies in March of 2013, and since then it’s only been available to pages.

    “This will make it easier for you to interact directly with individual readers and keep relevant conversations connected. Also, the most active and engaging conversations among your readers will be surfaced at the top of your posts ensuring that people who visit your Page will see the best conversations,” said Facebook at the time.

    I’ve not seen any evidence that Facebook is reordering comments on personal posts – but the reply button is definitely present on posts from users. I’ve reached out to Facebook for confirmation on the rollout and will update this article accordingly.

    So long, @tagging and ^^.

    UPDATE: Facebook confirmed the test.

    “We are testing the ability to reply directly to specific comments on a post so people can navigate comments more easily and have deeper conversations.” a spokesperson tells me.

  • Dropbox Finally Lets You Comment on Shared Files

    It just got easier to collaborate on your shared Dropbox files.

    The company has just enabled comments on shared files – a feature you’ve probably used plenty of times inside Google Drive.

    “Whether you’re collaborating on a business proposal or putting together a vacation itinerary, working with multiple people can be difficult. It can involve lots of back and forth conversations, scattered across email threads and chat windows. And in the process, feedback can get lost and it can take ages to get everyone on the same page. Today we’re simplifying that process. With comments, you can now have conversations around Dropbox files, both on the files you own and the files people share with you,” says Dropbox.

    Comments will let you @mention people, who will receive email notifications. You’ll also receive email notifications when people comment on your file.

    Of course, all of this is optional. If you own a file, you can turn off comments altogether. You can also turn of notifications, if they get pesky.

    Dropbox for Business users have had access to commenting for a little while now, but this is open to all Dropbox users. Right now it’s only on the web – but mobile support for comments is on the way.

    Image via Dropbox

  • Twitter Adds Comment Feature To Retweets

    Twitter Adds Comment Feature To Retweets

    You know how before when you retweeted something, it just tweeted out the exact tweet you were retweeting unless you quoted it yourself and added something that the 140-character limit would allow you to squeeze in?

    Twitter is now making it easier for you to add your own comments to a retweet without counting the original tweet against your character limit. You do have a limit, but you get 116 characters in a new comment box to make your point.

    To use the feature, just click the retweet button, and you’ll see the comment box above the tweet.

    For some reason the original tweet doesn’t display in an embed, but oh well.

    Just so you know, you can’t retweet your own quote tweet. I don’t know why you’d think that you could since you can’t retweet your own tweets in the first place, but Twitter felt the need to point that out, so I might as well too.

    The feature is available from the iOS app and the web version of Twitter. It will hit Android soon, the company says.

    According to TheNextWeb, Twitter is planning to include support for the feature in its API, so the functionality will work with third-party apps.

  • Should You Use Facebook Comments On Your Site?

    There are a variety of tools websites can use for user comments on blog posts and other content. Facebook has offered an option for years, and there have always been pros and cons of using its solution. The company held its annual f8 developer conference this week, and introduced some changes. There are still pros and cons, but there are new ones to consider.

    Do you use Facebook comments on your site or blog? Why or why not? Tell us about your experience or concerns.

    Facebook launched an update to its Comments plugin with what it calls “a cleaner design to make the plugin compatible with more sites and optimized for mobile.” It also comes with a new moderation tool with better spam filtering.

    The really interesting part, however, is that there’s a new feature that syncs comments between content on your website and that same content as shared on your Facebook page. This particular feature is in beta, but could be the one that truly makes the plugin a better option for business websites.

    “With Comment Mirroring, people can participate in a single conversation, whether comments come from your web page or your Facebook Page,” Facebook explains. “When you share a link from your website to your Facebook page, comments on your webpage will also appear as comments on your Facebook post and vice versa.”

    This could be especially helpful for small businesses who don’t have actual social media managers keeping a close eye on all of their social accounts at all times. It will make engaging in conversations that much easier, and better yet, the whole conversation around the content (or at least a more substantial part of it) will be happening in one place. That adds value to the content. Facebook says the feature will drive higher quality discussions and more comments. It also says the plugin itself leads to higher engagement and time spent on site.

    “We’ve redesigned the comments moderation tool to make it easier and faster for your community management team to moderate multiple comments at once,” the company says. “We’ve also improved our spam detection and filtering with best-in-class detection and automation systems.”

    You can navigate the tool using app-based moderation view or page-based moderation view in the dashboard. You can promote other users to be moderators of your comments, blacklist words, and engage in other general moderation like reviewing, banning, etc.

    To get the plugin, you can find the code generator here.

    In addition to what you get with that, you can change several settings. Here’s what you can do:

    Users can sort through the comments a few different ways, including by social ranking, by newest, and by oldest.

    You can choose which sorting option you want to use as the default, but it naturally defaults to Social Ranking. According to Facebook this uses social signals to surface the highest quality comments first.

    “Comments are ordered to display the most relevant comments from friends and friends of friends as well as the most-liked or active discussion threads,” it says. “Comments marked as spam are hidden from view.”

    If you want to change the default, use the data-order-by attribute and replace “social” with “time” or “reverse_time”.

    You can also adjust the language. More on how to do that here.

    One drawback of the new version of the plugin is that it no longer supports third-party login on comment boxes, so users will have to use their Facebook profiles. This makes sense given the comment mirroring feature, so it’s really only a drawback if you think you’ll miss people not using Facebook to comment, which is certainly a possibility. This could be the main thing that keeps some sites from adopting the plugin as their commenting option.

    The old version of the Comments plugin will stop working on June 23, which is ninety days after the release of Facebook’s Graph API v2.3, which includes the new version. You’ll need to enable the new version of the Facebook SDK for JavaScript or define v2.3 in the data-version attribute of the Comments plugin tag to enable the new version of the plugin. If you don’t manually upgrade before June 23, your implementation of the plugin will do so automatically.

    You can find all the documentation you should need for the new Comments plugin here.

    Do you intend to use the new version of Facebook’s Comments plugin? Let us know what you think about it.

    Images via Facebook

  • Add Value To Your Content With Reddit Embeds

    Add Value To Your Content With Reddit Embeds

    Reddit is now letting people embed its comment threads on their websites. They’ve been doing this for a couple of months with a limited number of people while the feature was in beta, but now anyone can embed comment threads from any public subreddit.

    To use the feature, just go to a comment’s permalink page, click on the “embed” link and grab the code.

    “Embeddable comments make it easy to showcase reddit comments on your website or blog without having to take screenshots or copy & paste long blocks of text,” the company says in a blog post. “Embedded comments will respect the comment author’s edits and deletions, and they’ll always feature a link back to the original comment thread and subreddit.”

    Reddit is a treasure trove of commentary on many subjects, so this feature should be able to add significant value to blog posts. Think about how much better embedded tweets and Facebook posts can make content when they’re relevant. Reddit comment threads can add a whole other type of value.

    The feature should be particularly popular for AMA (ask me anything) threads, which often occur for celebrities and other figures of note.

    Comment from discussion Steve Buscemi. AMA..

    The embed feature has a helpful component that lets you elect not to show a comment if it’s edited. If you utilize that, the comment text will be replaced by a link back to the current version of the comment on reddit if it’s edited.

    Reddit says it hopes the feature will spread the spirit of global collaboration a little further. If nothing else, it should serve to help reddit attract more eyeballs. It’s obviously a hugely popular site already, but there’s always room for growth. Twitter certainly still counts on off-site “usage”.

    It’s also a good way for good content on reddit to gain more exposure and rewards thoughtful comments on popular posts. Publishers already frequently turn to reddit for article topics, so this should help give back to the community that made the content interesting in the first place, at least in some cases.

    Image via reddit

  • To Shut Down Trolls, Site Asks Readers to Pay to Post Comments

    Would you pay money for the privilege of commenting on a website? If so, how much?

    An online magazine is looking to keep conversation on its articles “civilized and constructive” and has come up with the idea to charge readers for access to comments (both to read and to post them).

    Jewish culture mag Tablet hopes this move will “help [it] create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of [their] readers.”

    “Tablet is committed to bringing you smart, enlightening and entertaining reporting and writing on Jewish life, all free of charge. We take pride in our community of readers, and are thrilled that you choose to engage with us in a way that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking. But the Internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion, sometimes allowing destructive – and, often, anonymous – individuals to drag it down with invective (and worse). Instead of shutting off comments altogether (as some outlets are starting to do), we are going to try something else: Ask those of you who’d like to comment on the site to pay a nominal fee—less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation,” says the magazine.

    That nominal fee is $2 a day, $18 a month, or $180 a year.

    “The donation rates are small because we are not looking to make money, but instead to try to create a standard of engagement likely to turn off many, if not most, of the worst offenders. All proceeds go to helping us bring you the ambitious journalism that brought you here in the first place,” says Tablet.

    Some sites have moved away from commenting altogether. In late 2013 Popular Science disabled comments, saying “a politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics.” More recently, Bloomberg turned them off.

    It looks like Tablet wants to keep comments alive, at least in some way. It’s unclear how many readers will want to pay for the privilege.

    Tablet doesn’t operate any other paywalls – the articles are completely free. And if you don’t have the money and want to sound off, commenting is still free on their Facebook page.

    Images via Tablet Mag

  • Disqus Sponsored Comments Go Programmatic

    Disqus Sponsored Comments Go Programmatic

    Disqus, the blog commenting product that appears on sites all over the Internet (including this one), announced that it’s launching programmatic ad buying for its Sponsored Comments product.

    Disqus launched Sponsored Comments back in April after testing it for a bit. Here’s what they look like:

    Disqus is now working with WPP’s Xaxis to give the latter’s clients the ability to buy and place these ads across the Disqus network, which again, is all over the place on the web.

    “A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get the point across, just like any other Disqus comment,” writes David Fleck on the Disqus blog. “But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that page. Comments to the ad are driven to a separate landing page just for that ad. This keeps the core commenting experience uninterrupted and publisher communities just as they were. That’s the best of both worlds. Since those pilots campaigns, we’ve been working on two key things: targeting and brand safety.”

    They’re implementing semantic keyword targeting at the discussion level, and targeting against the topics of articles.

    “It’s a new way of thinking about targeting and a more effective one I think,” says Fleck. “It sounds simple, but as an advertiser, you want to reach people that are interested in your product. There’s a difference between your hypothetical target audience and your actual product audience. In other words, the difference between what surveys might tell you versus what actual individual consumers are interested in.”

    The targeting capabilities are interesting, but comment sections aren’t exactly known as a great place to find helpful links to click on. Typically if there’s a link trying to sell you something in the comments of a blog post, it’s spam. This is obviously different, but it’s hard to imagine that many Internet users don’t simply tune out links in blog comments unless they’re specifically relevant to the discussion.

    Either way, Disqus says it can target over 1,000 topics, and can easily add new ones to meet brand needs and trends.

    Image via Disqus

  • Facebook Lets You Use Stickers In Comments (Let The Disliking Commence)

    The moment you’ve been waiting for (or perhaps not) is here. You can now use Facebook stickers in comments. Until now, the feature has only been available in private messages, but now, you can expect to see stickers all over the social network, for better or for worse.

    Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin announced the news in a Facebook post (via TNW). He wrote:

    Stickers have been a delightful way to communicate in messages, and I’m happy to announce we’re bringing them to comments across Facebook. Just tap the smiley face icon in the bottom-right of any comment field to pick a sticker to send. It’ll be available to all posts from people, in groups, and on events now. I think stickers will allow people to reply to a variety of posts in a more fun way than words alone. You can now easily show your excitement for a post with good news, cheer up a friend who’s feeling down, and express a variety of more nuanced reactions.

    Stickers in Comments was started as a hackathon project in New York with me and Kwame, where we built the prototype for web in a single night. When we turned it on for employees soon after, they loved it. We later built it for mobile web at a hackathon in California, and the iOS & Android versions soon after.

    If you don’t have sticker support for comments yet, sit tight. It’s rolling out.

    Oh, and don’t forget, there’s a thumb-down sticker, so here’s that “dislike” option you’ve been clamoring for, at least in some capacity.

    Image via Facebook

  • Popular Site Aims To Set ‘Blueprint’ For Fighting Online Misogyny

    Last week, Drew Curtis, CEO of the popular news aggregation site Fark, announced that the site is cracking down on misogyny in comment threads.

    Do you think popular websites do enough to keep misogynistic comments away from users? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    As you probably know (especially if you’re a woman), there are a lot of terrible people saying terrible things about women on the Internet, and much of it goes unchecked. Curtis decided that he’d had enough of this happening on his site, and expressed regret about not coming down harder on it sooner.

    Curtis tells WebProNews that Fark is “working on a blueprint for others to follow.”

    “Every community should consider doing this,” he says.

    Curtis said in his announcement that Fark has been tightening up moderation style related to this stuff for a while, but last week, they updated the official rules. He noted that the move represented “enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates.”

    Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

    There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL’s “Jane, you ignorant slut” to Blazing Saddles’ multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another.

    On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it’s impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point. The mods try to be reasonable, and context often matters. We will try and determine what you meant, but that’s not always a pass. If your post can be taken one of two ways, and one of those ways can be interpreted as misogynistic, the mods may delete it — even if that wasn’t your intent.

    Things that aren’t acceptable:

    – Rape jokes
    – Calling women as a group “whores” or “sluts” or similar demeaning terminology
    – Jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it

    Obviously, these are just a few examples and shouldn’t be taken as the full gospel, but to give you a few examples of what will always be over the line. Trying to anticipate every situation and every conversation in every thread would be ridiculous, so consider these guidelines and post accordingly. I recommend that when encountering grey areas, instead of trying to figure out where the actual line is, the best strategy would be to stay out of the grey area entirely.

    Whenever a foot is put down on what can’t be included in Internet comment threads, there are inevitably some that cry, “Censorship!”

    Curtis tells us, however, that so far the response has been “nothing but positive,” and that there has been no uptick in commenters testing Fark’s new policy.

    “It’s been surprisingly smooth,” he says.

    As a story at Vice recently put it, Fark banning misogyny actually “facilitates free speech,” because it means women can be more comfortable expressing their thoughts without worrying about the dregs of the Internet threatening to rape them or otherwise harass them.

    Fark’s move could indeed provide inspiration for other online environments to take similar action, and that’s one of the reasons the site has gotten some national news coverage for it.

    Gawker also recently cracked down on users posting “rape GIFs” on its Jezebel site, though only after Jezebel called out the company itself in a blog post. This story also put the spotlight on the Internet’s rampant misogyny.

    These moves from Fark and Gawker aren’t going to solve the whole problem, but they’re certainly positive moves in a better direction. Any other sites inspired to follow suit will just serve as additional steps.

    Do you think online misogyny can be largely stamped out? Let us know what you think.

    Image via YouTube

  • Disqus Is Now Including Sponsored Comments

    Disqus announced that it has been testing Sponsored Comments for the past month, and that it’s now expanding the new ad unit so that “it’ll be more likely that you come across” one. Here’s what one might look like:

    Disqus ads

    If you use Disqus, but have ads turned off, you don’t have to worry about them appearing.

    This follows another ad format Disqus launched earlier this year called Featured Comments, which let publishers highlight things at the top of a thread.

    “Because Disqus now helps websites make money from engagement and discussion, a natural question came up – can we use the concept of Featured Comments in order to allow brands to reach specific audiences? This was the idea behind Sponsored Comments,” Disqus says in a blog post.

    “Sponsored Comments let businesses deliver a message to the people they need to reach,” it adds. “A Sponsored Comment can use all types of media to get their point across, just like any other Disqus comment. But they’re not part of the discussion happening on that thread or community itself. That’s too disruptive. So instead, they’re pinned to the top of the discussion environment where things are just getting started. It’s like movie previews. It’s not the thing you came for, but if done well, it adds a little bit to your experience without being intrusive. We’re testing whether or not we can make this true.”

    Early reaction to the ads is generally positive. Users seem to appreciate that they respect the sites that turn off ads. People are interested in targeting options and potential clickthrough rates.

    Image via Disqus

  • Cutts: Don’t Worry About Grammatical Errors In Your Blog Comments

    In his latest “Webmaster Help” video, Google’s Matt Cutts answers a question that a lot of people have probably wondered, particularly since Google launched the Panda update in 2011: how do the comments on your blog affect how Google sees the quality of your pages?

    The exact wording of the question was:

    Should I correct the grammar on comments to my WordPress blog? Should I not approve comments with poor grammar? Will approving comments with grammar issues affect my page’s quality rating?

    Long story short: don’t worry about it.

    “I wouldn’t worry about the grammar in your comments. As long as the grammar on your own page is fine, you know, there are people on the Internet, and they write things, and it doesn’t always make sense. You can see nonsense comments, you know, on YouTube and other large properties, and that doesn’t mean a YouTube video won’t be able to rank. Just make sure that your own content is high quality, and you might want to make sure that people aren’t leaving spam comments. You know, if you’ve got a bot, than they might leave bad grammar, but if it’s a real person, and they’re leaving a comment, and the grammar is not slightly perfect, that usually reflects more on them than it does on your site, so I wouldn’t stress out about that.”

    You would think the spam would reflect more on them too, but go ahead and continue stressing out about that.

    Images via YouTube

  • YouTube Gives Users New Comment Management Page

    Google has launched a new Comments page for video creators so they can manage their comments from a single place. Recent changes to the commenting system have caused a great deal of backlash among users. Some of that (but certainly not all of it) was related to this.

    In a blog post, YouTube engineer Patrick Doyle wrote, “Many of you have told us that you use your YouTube Inbox to manage comments. With the new commenting system moving comment notices to alerts, removing this feature was, well, a bummer.”

    “Staying connected with your audience is critical on YouTube, so we fast-tracked the development of a new comment management page that lets you see, respond to and moderate your comments all in one place,” he added.

    You can simply go to youtube.com/comments to manage comments. From here, you can remove and flag comments as spam or for abuse, give them a thumbs up, and go to the video page to reply. It will also let you toggle between comments published on the channel and those pending, as well as those marked as spam.

    Google says it will be adding additional features to the page in the near future. They give a couple examples like the ability to reply inline and expand all replies.

    The commenting system was changed in November. The backlash was quite great for a variety of reasons. Many criticized Google for making people use Google+. Even one of YouTube’s co-founders came out of years of silence on the site to slam the new system.

    Still, this isn’t the first time Google has tried to ease some of the concerns with the new system. Later in November, Google implemented better recognition of bad links and impersonation attempts, as well as ASCII art detection and a change to how log comments are displayed. These changes were aimed at reducing spam that was taking advantage of the new system.

    Image via YouTube

  • What Was Worse In 2013 – Yahoo Mail Or YouTube Comments?

    Google and Yahoo are two of the biggest tech firms around. They service millions of users everyday with products ranging from email and search to video and news. In 2013, they also became some of the most hated companies in tech.

    People hate change. Yahoo and Google tried to implement some changes into their flagship products and in the process made just about everybody super angry with them. In the spirit of the impending new year, we should take a look at who had it worse and what both companies can do to fix it.

    What did you hate more in 2013 – Yahoo Mail or YouTube comments? Let us know in the comments.

    Yahoo’s troubles began in June when it forced users over to a new Yahoo Mail that delivered ads based on the content of their emails. While it seemed like a simple upgrade, many users were stuck with countless errors and bugs that made Yahoo Mail unusable for some users. In fact, our first story on the matter attracted over 700 comments – most of them angry.

    While you could easily dismiss the problems plaguing Yahoo Mail as something that happens to all upgraded services, it became evident over the next six months that this wasn’t a simple problem. Yahoo continued to see complaints a month after users were forced to switch to the new Yahoo Mail with many users saying they were jumping ship. One in particular said they would be fine if Yahoo Mail actually let them opt out of receiving ads, but found that the process wasn’t as easy as it seemed:

    “Also, though there is a supposed procedure available for users to opt-out of receiving ads; when I tried to opt-out of all advertising, it did not work correctly, and gave me a message something like: You have successfully opted out of receiving ads from 84 providers, but the process failed with these 16 companies”

    In an attempt to smooth things over, Yahoo introduced a new Yahoo Mail design in October to address many of the problems users were having. They also threw in 1TB of storage as a sign of good faith. As it turns out, however, you can’t make everybody happy and the changes that made Yahoo Mail look more like Gmail angered people even more. Case in point – our story on the Yahoo Mail update received over 450 comments and most were negative again.

    Putting the final nail in the coffin, Yahoo Mail suffered continued outages earlier this month that left many people without any way to access their messages. Yahoo blamed the outages on a “hardware problem in one of [their] mail data centers.” With this latest outage, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer got involved and issued an apology on behalf of the entire company.

    Now all that sounds bad, but is it bad as what YouTube did to its commenting system earlier this year?

    Back in September, YouTube announced that it was integrating Google+ into YouTube comments in an attempt to clean things up. The intended goal was to bring the good comments to the top while pushing what you usually see on YouTube to the bottom. It’s a good idea, but the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

    In early November, the new YouTube comments went live and with it, users were forced to sign up for Google+. Google figured that people would be a little less vulgar if their real names were tied to comments, but Google may have not anticipated how much people hate Google+. It’s not that it’s a bad service – it’s just that many people feel that nobody uses it. YouTube creators were especially angry with the change as they felt the new commenting system harmed the community interaction with their videos.

    While you could argue either way on the merit of requiring a Google+ account to comment on YouTube videos, you can’t deny that it opened up an entirely new way to spam YouTube videos. While the original intended goal of the new system was to cut down on spam, we saw in the days following the update that users were spamming videos with ASCII art of a stick man named Bob and his army of tanks and helicopters devoted to destroying the new comments system.

    Just like Yahoo, Google was quick to respond to the complaints. In the two weeks after the new commenting system went live, Google introduced some changes that would cut down on the amount of spam links, ASCII art and other annoying comments that people were seeing. It also promised to soon launch comment curation tools for creators so they could help better shape conversations.

    Even with the changes, YouTube still requires a Google+ account to comment on videos. That obviously rubs some people the wrong way and it will continue to do so in the new year.

    With both tales of woe out of the way, which was worse – Yahoo Mail or YouTube comments? If we’re going strictly by the amount of negative comments, Yahoo Mail easily takes the cake. Granted, Yahoo Mail has had more time to anger users with its rollout beginning in June while the new YouTube comments only launched in November.

    Without any good metric, we’re forced to let the readers decide. Were you angered more by Yahoo Mail or YouTube comments this year? Do you see any way that Yahoo and Google could improve their services going into 2014? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via yahoo/YouTube