Comments Are Now First Names

June 26th, 2014
comments
The comments in the Facebook and Google+ discussions about my posts are mirrored back on jefftk.com. I started doing this because I wanted people reading posts via my site, some of who refuse to use Facebook, to be able to read the comments, but I also like that it can thread comments and integrate discussions happening in different places.

As Google continues running more javascript, however, these comments have been showing up in searches for people's names and they've have been suprised to see their words appear outside of Facebook. I've always been happy to remove people's comments from this mirroring or switch them to first names if they ask, but following some metadiscussion on yesterday's post it sounds like many people had refrained from commenting because they didn't want their full names linked to posts. I've now switched all comments here to first name only. This does lose a little clarity when two Bens are going back and forth [1], but if more people feel comfortable commenting I think it's worth it.

(This is retroactive; existing comments are also just first names. I'm also still happy to make custom changes for people, like skipping your posts entirely, using initials, or using a nickname.)


[1] One fix would be to dynamically add last initials if needed for disambiguation. This is a little tricky, as it requires a pass over all the names before you can choose how to display each, but I could do that if things become too confusing.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

Looking over some discussions in the new firstname-only format, I actually like it a lot. It feels a lot more friendly and casual.

Hollis (11y, via fb):link

I love this. I've felt weird about it a bunch of times but it hasn't risen to the point of saying anything. I still have a pretty unusual first name but I feel a lot better having it be less Google-able.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Hollis: You have an unusual name, but not to the point that a search for [hollis] brings up stuff about you. Very few people are going to have first names that distinctive.

Hollis (11y, via fb):link

Yeah, exactly!

David (11y, via fb):link

@Jeff Kaufman: Will a comment like this one show your full name? Does that matter?

Hollis (11y, via fb):link

@David: yes, it does display it. I'll probably adopt a habit of deleting people's last names (as I often do anyway in conversational threads).

Chet (11y, via fb):link

Seeing as Jeff's Facebook posts are "Shared with: Public" (hover over the little globe icon next to the timestamp at the top of the post), all comments and the names of commentors are visible to the internet, anyway. E.g., visit https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/665718607452 while logged out of Facebook. Sorry, I think this first-name-only-by-default policy is a bad move responding to ignorance of privacy settings.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@C.a.: "I think this first-name-only-by-default policy is a bad move responding to ignorance of privacy settings."

There are different levels of privacy. Facebook comments don't normally show up in search engines, even if they're marked as "public",
because they're hidden via facebook's robots.txt. If I didn't mirror comments onto jefftk.com people would still be able to click through to facebook to read comments, but they wouldn't show up in searches. This fix is to keep search engines from connecting searches for someone's name to comments on these posts.

David (11y, via fb):link

Hollis: Yeah, I figured it would. I also usually use first names, I just wanted to test that out and point out that people might leak full names by accident. I picked on Jeff because his full name was already on his own website.

Vivian (11y, via fb):link

David: I first misread that as a different good idea: Jeff's comments should possibly be full-name or marked as [author] to make it clear how they relate to the original post.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Isaac: "Jeff's comments should possibly be full-name or marked as [author] to make it clear how they relate to the original post."

I tested whitelisting it so it would use my full name, but I didn't like how it looked. First names only is clean and consistent.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@David, Hollis: Yes, full name tagging still comes through. I'm not excited about this, but almost all the fb tagging I see people doing is first name only.

(Figuring out when a "Jeff Kaufman" inline in a comment is a name vs some other random text is tricky because there's no markup. G+ does have markup for this in the "API" and also only supports full-name tagging, so I've fixed it for those comments.)

Danner (11y, via fb):link

I'm.... unaffected by this. But cool!

Chet (11y, via fb):link

Jeff, it seems Googlebot does index Facebook public posts, including comments:
https://www.google.com/search...

Chet (11y, via fb):link

Facebook's https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt doesn't disallow it, either.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@C.a.: Interesting; you're right!

Chet (11y, via fb):link

https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info-on-fb :
"When you comment on or "like" someone else's story, or write on their timeline, that person gets to select the audience. For example, if a friend posts a Public story and you comment on it, yo
ur comment will be Public. Often, you can see the audience someone selected for their story before you post a comment; however, the person who posted the story may later change their audience. So, if you comment on a story, and the story’s audience changes, the new audience can see your comment."

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

Still, comments on facebook posts don't tend to show up when people search for their names, while mirrored comments on my blog posts were showing up. So using first names does seem like it's decreasing searchability somewhat.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

(Personally I don't mind searchability for my stuff at all; I think the pressure to write things I'll be ok standing behind years later is good for me and good for discourse. But I also don't want to push people into this for themselves.)

Adam Yie (11y, via g+):link

asy or Adam Yie please.

Jillian (11y, via fb):link

C.a. is of course right that I should still feel uncomfortable posting here even with the change, but I do think it's at least an improvement.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Jillian: "I should still feel uncomfortable posting here even with the change"

To be clear, though, it's not just comment threads in response to my posts, it's any comment thread on fb with it's privacy set to public.

Chet (11y, via fb):link

If I'm writing something anywhere on the Internet, tend to expect that it could wind up being seen everywhere on the Internet.

Jillian (11y, via fb):link

Yes, I know. I hadn't realized there was an easy way to tell whether posts were public or private, so that's useful. Looking down my friendslist, most of my friends set their posts to "Friends Only", while you have made a different choice. So I will continue to be uncomfortable posting here, because there are some threads that I don't want to be permanently recorded as having opinions on in a place where e.g. any disgruntled parent of any student I might ever teach could see them.

On the other hand, I also still think scraping people's comments to another site without their consent was a weird violation of privacy, and I continue to be bewildered that it didn't bother anyone else.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Jillian: "Looking down my friendslist, most of my friends set their posts to 'Friends Only', while you have made a different choice."

Interesting; looking over my stream I see maybe 50/40/10 friends/public/custom.


"I also still think scraping people's comments to another site without their consent was a weird violation of privacy, and I continue to be bewildered that it didn't bother anyone else."

Does it bother you that Google scrapes facebook comments to put in search results on their site? I realize these aren't completely parallel, but issues of consent around scraping are weird.

Jillian (11y, via fb):link

The attitude of your other commenters also makes me feel uncomfortable posting here. So that's all fine.

Jillian (11y, via fb):link

Google is a creepy evil corporation. You're not. Hopefully. I generally expect better behavior from my friends than from search engines.

Which, I suppose, is "yes, it does also bother me, but I have a lot of learned helplessness when it comes to Google and Facebook doing horrible things with my data."

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Jillian: "Google is a creepy evil corporation."

Do you mean you're not ok with search engines scraping websites to collect information and make it available more widely, in general?


Most of the stuff people have been saying about Google being 'creepy' or 'evil' isn't about search but g+/ads/nsa/etc.

Jillian (11y, via fb):link

I'd really like it if spaces where I could say things and not have them end up on search engines were distinct from spaces where I can say things and they will end up on search engines.

Also, I'm not enjoying this conversation sufficiently that I need to stop having it. Sorry.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via fb):link

@Jillian: "I'd really like it if spaces where I could say things and not have them end up on search engines were distinct from spaces where I can say things and they will end up on search engines."

So it's not all scraping, but having an unpredictable mixture of content that will and won't be scraped. Definitely makes sense.

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via g+):link

@Adam Yie : done!

Todd (11y, via g+):link

I was waiting until I had an opinion to comment on this, and now I think I do have one- it's confusing when David C and David G both comment on the same post. So maybe change it to include the C/G? Or maybe only do that when multiple people with the same name comment (that could be a lot of work, admittedly).

Jeff Kaufman (11y, via g+):link

@Todd  I agree; David is too common for this to work well.

Does hover text show up in search?  If not I could use that.  But I can't find anyone saying one way or the other, and an experiment would take a while. 

Todd (11y, via g+):link

No idea. Due to their prominence, xkcd strips might be a good test case, assuming link hover text and image alt-text are sufficiently similar (I guess I don't actually know that they are).

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