

Please stop at-ing your friends - unknownian
https://m3hr.github.io/2015/01/31/please-stop-ing-your-friends.html

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markbao
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).

~~~
tempestn
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.

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wan23
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.

~~~
sootzoo
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.

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gkoberger
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.

~~~
lighthazard
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.

~~~
jnevill
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.

------
schrodinger
I don't really understand the authors frustration. What's wrong with
mentioning a friend in a comment or post so they'll see it?

~~~
markbao
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.

~~~
callil
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.

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malandrew
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.

------
Bahamut
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.

~~~
city41
This is what the OP is referring to:
[http://i.imgur.com/jOOrFgP.png](http://i.imgur.com/jOOrFgP.png)

On popular posts like IFLScience, "at" comments make up the vast majority of
comments.

------
0x0
Facebook should offer an option to hide comments with nothing but a @nametag
in them.

~~~
grecy
Good idea. In fact, why doesn't it do that by default? Other than notifying
the person, there is no reason for it to be there.

------
city41
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.

------
avoutthere
“You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”

~~~
unknownian
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?

~~~
city41
It could also be argued the "hacker" way to solve this is a greasemonkey
script that removes the comments.

~~~
unknownian
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.

------
andrewflnr
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.

------
bitwize
We have more pressing issues to address, like people using hashtags out loud,
in real life. Let's tackle that one first.

~~~
meowface
I'm not even old (22), but hearing people say hashtags aloud makes me
physically wince. It's like nails on chalkboard.

------
cyanbane
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.

------
hookey
This (among many other things) ruins YouTube comments for me too. Whose
magnificent idea was it to put shares and comments in the same category?

------
sink
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)?

~~~
unknownian
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.

~~~
sink
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!

------
vmarsy
as markbao says this is the fastest way to share the link.

This is also the way to share things on Instagram, so if you're used to it, it
feels normal to use it on Facebook as well.

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technomancy
Get better friends maybe?

Who does this?

~~~
unknownian
I was referring to public facebook pages, like musicians posting about their
new albums or something. Sorry to not make that clear.

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steele
Sounds like someone that is not getting at-ed

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jkirch
Wait, Facebook comments have "value?" I think you're asking a little to much

