Comment on ESPN.com....through facebook

All comments to ESPN.com stories will have to be made on facebook. Here is the notice that is being posted on the site:
Effective July 17, ESPN will be transitioning all conversations to Facebook comments. At that time a Facebook account will be required to post comments on new articles. Previous comments and conversations will be closed to comment but can still be viewed.

 

Heard about this happening elsewhere. Makes people more accountable for their comments. I say it's a good thing.

 

Agree. It will cut down on comments dramatically, but 95 percent of the comments you'll lose are ones you won't miss anyway.

The fact that you'll lose the drive-by assholes chiming in with their pithy little hilarious contests about who can be the biggest douchebag is not a negative, IMO. And that goes for newspapers who have gone to Facebook commenting, as well.

 

You don't lose that. Maybe you cut down on it. But it's still the dominant form of comment.

 

Agree. It's in fact shocking to me how many people still act like an asshole - or don't realize how much of an asshole they are - when they're using their real name.

 

Good thing you can't just up and create a fake Facebook profile and use that to comment on sites.

 

That's a pain in the ass, and Facebook eventually will delete a fake account.

The entire idea is to make commenting anonymously difficult, not to stop it entirely. Give people hoops to jump through, and most won't.

 

Can we switch to FB comments here? I'd love to get rid of a few of you!!

 

We transitioned to Facebook-linked comments about 1.5 years ago, and it hasn't kept the crazies away at all. Once you reach a certain level of crazy, there's rarely any level of shame involved anyway, so anonymity isn't really much of a concern for a lot of folks.

 

I can now rest easy this morning knowing that dozens upon dozens of Facebook accounts named Danny Noonan and Judge Smails are all legitimate.

 

Has Facebook changed it's policy? For the first five years, fake accounts were deleted. It sometimes took months.