I get aggravated at seeing these comments too, but I'm not surprised why they don't use the 'formalized' routes for sharing. Tagging someone in the comments is the path of least resistance, and people have acclimated to it—and at this point, it's hard to change because the incentive to change would be to keep a comments section clean, which people don't really care about.
I'd argue that, failing convincing people that it's annoying to do so or changing to the UI to lead people to the "share" function instead, the solution is to filter these kinds of comments out programmatically, showing them only to the sender and recipient(s).
You've got it right. If this is enough of an issue for enough people to make it worthwhile, programmatically filtering out those comments from the general view should be straightforward, and a hell of a lot easier than convincing everyone to behave differently.
Attempting to convince users to stop doing things the easy way is futile and a filter could be implemented conveniently. Give the users what they want, to be able to type a friend's name into the comment box to share. If their incentive is to be seen publicly sharing the link with their friend in that context (proudly putting friendship on display is essential for many FB users), it could be made visible only to those users' friends.
Maybe I've internalized too much agile propaganda, but to me it sounds crazy to assume that people's preferred way to use a product is wrong, especially when adjusting to fit their preferences is so easy.
I like your idea of filtering the and converting to a notification. It feels like a kind of "command line" comment section. I wonder what else you could enable using this idea. @saved @favorties @hackernews?
I think maybe you're touching on the real issue. The user is expressing metadata as content because it is easier than the going through the interface. This will probably be the case in any short-lived activity.
The proper response is not to tell users to stop. The proper response is to advance how we interpret user behavior.
The thing is, on Facebook if you post something it may or may not appear in a friend's stream. If you know of a specific person who would benefit from seeing something, at-ing that person makes sure that they see it. Maybe Facebook should add a new field to signal that someone would be interested or hide @mentions of other people in comments, but you can't really blame the user for this.
The bigger crime is that there's a perfectly good permalink for every FB post, but nobody seems to use it to reference content, when @-ing a friend is easier, quicker, and supported on every client.
Despite agreeing it's annoying, I'm going to push back.
This is how innovation happens. Retweets, the "@name" sytanx and hashtags all came from people molding the existing system to fit their needs... and Twitter/FB eventually just built them in. This paradigm is proof to Twitter/FB that this needs to be built in. Twitter has recently added the ability to DM tweets; I bet FB is doing something similar.
I think it's more of a privacy issue than convenience issue. Perhaps the author would rather keep it private between him and his friend that he has a particular interest.
This is it for me. Its rude and I despise it when some @'s me on a big public post. Share that shit and don't plaster my name where thousands of eyeballs can see it. Let me control what I'm connected to.
I can't think of an instance where I've been annoyed that a friend has mentioned me in a comment. I'd prefer that to explicit sharing via some other mechanism anyway if they want to involve me in the discussion.
The thing that is annoying, you see a post, that you are interested in. It has 36 comments. You open the comments to read what people have to say, then you have to sit there scrolling through a list of names. In the end there is a half dozen comments. Surely there has to be a better way to tell your friend about the post.
In my opinion, it buries the actual discussion on the post in question under a stream of name-mentions.
Imagine if people on HN didn't email an article link to someone, but just @mentioned their name as a comment. With a ranking system like HN's, established comments would rise, but there would still be a ton of crud making it harder to, say, see new comments.
I think you're right and it just demonstrates a lack of good intuitive UX around content sharing. Instagram is especially bad in this regard, popular posts are just polluted with @ mentions.
This is just an indication that neither facebook nor twitter has implemented an obvious feature:
Whenever the only content of a message is names of friends, then they should perform a sharing action without actually posting the message. Then people can decide via a setting if they would or wouldn't not like to see at-messages shown.
I don't quite understand the OP - I just used Facebook's mentioning feature a few days ago on a big status update reviewing antics with friends for the couple of days prior. I mentioned ~50 friends in the post, it was a great time for all involved, and everyone was happy with it. I also mentioned friends in comments I didn't get to hang out with during the weekend.
I don't think I have seen any friends abuse the mentioning ever on Facebook. I can't speak for Twitter since I hardly ever use it.
It seems I've had to edit my post. I don't have a problem with tagging. I think it's a waste of space on popular facebook pages where most of the comments are literally just names of people tagged. Tagging your friends in a personal thing is obviously fine.
I agree at-ing people is really annoying. They can easily make up 90%+ of the comments on popular posts like IFLScience. But the flip side is popular posts have such low quality comments that even if you took the time to dig past all the at's, you wouldn't find much of value. So I find the real solution is to just ignore comments on Facebook.
Have you never written something with some form of hyperbole? Isn't it implied that I'm trying to get a feature improvement? Isn't this a hacker community that wants better software and better uses for them?
perhaps avoutthere was also being slightly hyperbolic.
The fact remains that OP chose to to write an entire article about this, someone chose to share it on HN, and many of us are taking the time to share our opinions in these here comments.
I'm not bothered by any of these things, including the original 'problem' and people using hash tags in real life, but it really fascinates me that other people are (whether they're also being hyperbolic or not).
I'm wondering if this is an age thing, perhaps. I'm in my late twenties and I distinctly remembered being bothered quite often by many things like this that I now consider trivial. At some point I just stopped caring.
I'm trying to 'toot my own horn here', by the way. I get annoyed way too much by other kinds of 'trivialities', like people standing too close to me in public spaces, or people standing in front of public transport vehicle doors without letting others out first. I'm just wondering whether there's any particular logic to how my frustrations shifted over time, and whether the same logic applies to other people.
Greasemonkey is unnecessary bloat, Facebook runs at a crawl as it is. This is broken design that could be mitigated with improved sharing functionality. Not that it could be ever eliminated, but these tools change functionality to offer better alternatives, imo.
I think this habit comes from a desire to have everyone on the same comment thread. On FB at least, I don't think there's a better way to do that, and it's hard to imagine a better system to, say, share comment threads between posts, while allowing people to have control of what's on their feed and not confusing the living daylights out of them. Anyway, I don't buy that it's a strictly useless behavior.
I don't use FB, but I do use twitter (and slack plays into this also as I use it with friends) but you (the subscriber) always control the channel and the attention you give it. Kill your inbound channel, once that's done people will give up using it as a communication mechanism to get an idea to you.
I am really, really sorry you don't like how social communication channels are evolving. It's a bummer that other people aren't using the Internet the way you want.
How can we fix this? Well, certainly the next time we build another generation of the Internet we will consult you. In the meantime, perhaps you can get working on an RFC for how people are supposed to use @mention and #hashtag constructions? Do I sense a standards group waiting to be formed (possibly in a church or YMCA basement)?
I appreciate the snark, but I am a fan of evolution of communication, especially organic ones. My problem is when people choose to systemically waste webspace and my screenspace when I want to read comments and instead get a laundry list of people's names.
I just think that shouting at people to behave a certain way is going to have little effect. Online communities either moderate or incentivize people to act a certain way.
In my opinion a more constructive comment would be directed at Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Channel X, telling them why consuming their services when people behave this way is noisy and troublesome.
Asking people to change how they behave, especially when that behavior is lazy, seems like it is going to have a low chance of success. Asking the creators of a product to alter how people interact with it, by either changing how information is represented and making the communication less noisy, or dissuading a certain type of behavior, might have better results!
I'd argue that, failing convincing people that it's annoying to do so or changing to the UI to lead people to the "share" function instead, the solution is to filter these kinds of comments out programmatically, showing them only to the sender and recipient(s).