Facebook and the tag-comments

I haven't written a tech-related post for a while, so here's one on what seems to a relatively new phenomenon on Facebook that is spreading at a rapid rate and really detracts from the user experience: the 'tag-comment'. I can't be the only one who, when viewing comments on a post, wants to see people's opinions and reactions to it, rather than a huge and meaningless list of names who have been tagged by their friends just to draw their attention to the post.

I don't know any of these people so this is just pointless clutter that means nothing to me. Imagine this multiplied by several hundred and then try to find some actual comments.

A post on a page or in a group can easily end up with thousands of comments, but the majority of them are nothing but a list of names which distract from the proper comments and it is extremely difficult to wade through this neverending list and find the meaningful content. It is of no interest whatsoever to me that someone I don't know has tagged someone else I don't know and these tags just waste space in the comment feed and make it hard to read, so there is really no need for them to be there. Stupidly, if the post is in a group Facebook will even allow you to tag a user who is not even a member of that group and will not be able to see the post, so this is a totally pointless exercise that does nothing other than clutter up the comments with garbage.

As a result of all this, when I see that a post has hundreds or thousands of comments, I don't even bother opening the comments section as I just know most of them will be tagged names that I don't care about in the slightest, which negates the whole concept of allowing comments as a means for users to express themselves. Trying to locate actual comments that express an opinion on the content of the post and may actually be worth reading is like finding a needle in a haystack and not worth the effort of wading through so much dross in search of the occasional worthwhile comment.

The problem of tag-comments also exacerbates another Facebook issue. When your news feed shows you that your friend commented on a post, there is no direct link to that friend's comment and trying to find it amongst hundreds or thousands of other comments is virtually impossible, which makes telling you about it a bit pointless. Even if you do manage to find the comment your friend made, chances are it will just be a tag-comment tagging one of their friends, which is a disappointment after so much effort spent finding it. Linking straight to a specific comment can be done, as when a friend replies to a comment there is a direct link to the original comment and the friend's reply, so I don't understand why the same thing hasn't been done for new comments that are not replies.

There are 11,000 comments so how on earth am I supposed to find the one my friend made?

Of course, I appreciate that users want to draw their friends' attention to things they might like, but this is basically a private matter between these parties that is irrelevant to everyone else so it doesn't need to be done through the public comments. A better solution would be to provide a 'notify friends' option next to each post, in which you can type your friends' names and it sends them a private notification with a link to the post without putting anything in the comments that are visible to anyone else. That way, the comments section can be kept to meaningful content and doesn't just become a long list of tagged names that serve very little purpose except to create unnecessary clutter that makes real comments harder to find.

Sadly it is unlikely that Facebook will ever do anything to get rid of the tag-comments, as the number of comments on a post (regardless of their content) is used as one of the main indicators of its popularity. They may be annoying from the user's point of view, but from a commercial point of view tag-comments are a good thing as they help the post to spread, and it is not the users that Facebook make their money from so their priorities are obvious and tag-comments are encouraged. Posts that specifically instruct users to tag a friend are on the rise, and all these are really doing is spreading spam and artificially boosting the popularity of a page that can then be sold to the highest bidder.

There is something you can do to make tag-comments go away though: among the many great features of the immensely useful FBPurity browser add-on, pressing the Z key while viewing comments will hide any that contain only usernames. This isn't perfect as it won't hide comments that contain any other text alongside the usernames, but it goes a long way to reducing the clutter and brings some semblance of order to Facebook's chaotic interface. I for one would find it very difficult to use Facebook without FBPurity, but unfortunately it is only available for desktop browsers and not for mobile devices, so when viewing Facebook on my phone I have to put up with the endless tag-comments and they soon start to frustrate me with their pointlessness.