A few days ago I read a post by our friend Kristi Hines on a site called Income Diary titled 20 Most Influential People In Social Media. Like I did when I created my two lists of influential blacks in social media, she came up with a measurable criteria to use to compile her list.
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Kristi did a very nice job with her list. There’s even 2 black people on the list and a nice mixture of men and women. It turns out that everyone on the list is from the United States, but the numbers are the numbers. And she didn’t add some fairly obvious choices either, although in retrospect she probably should have added Darren Rowse to give it an international flavor in some fashion.
Me being me, however, I decided I had to do something different. I decided to check out the blogs of all the people on the list, and I was looking for something in particular. I was curious who had 3rd party blog commenting systems and who had the traditional WordPress system. Turns out only 3 people on the list have the traditional way that I personally like. The others had a mixture of Disqus, Livefyre, and some other options.
You might not believe this, but I didn’t find it all that surprising. It seems that the way people who get tons of comments handle things is to go to a third party system. It reduces the number of comments they might get in total, although if one is popular one will still get lots of responses, and it reduces the amount of spam as well. They can afford to do it; most of the rest of us can’t, and in my case, won’t.
I’ve sometimes referred to 3rd party systems as systems of the elite; kind of like the Republican Party (sorry; I had a moment lol). Those that are already there use it because it helps them keep things under control. Those that aren’t there but want to feel as if they’re there use it and wonder why they don’t have a lot of comments because they’re doing what the top dogs are doing.
Of course what’s interesting is that if Darren Rowse, whose blog is ranked the highest out of any of the people on Kristi’s list as far as Alexa goes, was on the list he’s one of the people who uses the same comment system most of us uses.
As Forrest Gump says, “that’s all I have to say about that.”
I went to a third party system (intense debate) for a couple of reasons. I did like all the additional social features that the platform provided. I wanted to give people more options to share their comments and interact with my blog from outside sources.
Also, I was able to cut down on the number of plugins on my blog as I have one plugin from intense debate that handles a variety of commenting features that it used to take 3-4 plugins to handle. I foudn that before, on occassion, a plugin would break when it updated. Then I would have to take the time to de-activiate it. Find a replacement, or wait for the author to fix the update, then reactivate it again.
Once in a long while, a plugin update would even break my entire site. So, I wanted to cut down on the possible sources of errors by reducing my plugins and just having one reliable third party system handle several different features.
Anyways, I chose Intense Debate because I was able to customize the CSS and it had addon features I liked, such as comment luv. I looked at Dusqus, which is popular, but it’s javascript based so the search engines can’t crawl the comments. I think it still works that way.
I tried out Livefyre as well, but they’re still a growing platform and need a bit more time to mature. They have a comment luv like feature, but it only shows the latest post instead of giving a list of choices.
Anyways, just my two cents on third party commenting systems.
Thanks for your two cents Richard. 🙂 I’ll go a different route, however. My friend Sire put up a survey a couple of years ago asking people if they’d hold off on commenting on “systems” rather than what WordPress gives. Half of the people said they would, and that pretty much means those of you with those systems are losing the potential of 50% more of your visitors participating in the process. Now, you might not care, but for me, I welcome the traffic and the comments that having a relatively easy system to comment on brings.
I will say that I agree with your assessment on plugins, but I’m doubting that Livefyre or Intense Debate eliminates all plugins that crash. However, I always say that people can do what they want as long as they understand what they’re going to get, or not get. The big names will still get lots of comments; folks who aren’t as big might be turning more of those former commenters away. I’d rather not risk it.
Hi,
I don’t really love any other commenting system except for the normal wordpress one. The reason for this is because, I don’t want to allow my site to have too much request on my server and some other things like that. Since the normal system works well, why third party system? I don’t think I need that.
BTW: Mitchell, thanks for the nice post.
I’ve been using the native system, and I’m wondering why people felt the need for a different one? I think the one here is just fine. I guess some like the ability to connect in with Facebook and other social media site.
As long as I have an option to post my comment without having to log in to some system, I’m happy. I like commenting on other people’s blogs, but the longer it takes me to make a comment (outside of how long it takes me to compose the comment, that is), the less likely I am to comment on that site in the future.
One problem with an “all in one” system is that one bug could throw off the entire thing. Usually, if an individual plug in breaks, the rest still work just fine. And sometimes, the individual ones do a better job than the “all in one” for that task.
Great post, Mitch!
Thanks Grady, and I think you captured most of my thoughts with your comment. I hadn’t thought much about the FB & social media connections, but it seems CommentLuv has come out with something that, if people feel the need for that type of thing, it will handle just fine.
I just looked at the list, not personally surprised for some of the people in the list. I don’t think that commenting system does matter much, however same as you I also prefer native commenting system, but mostly content and the website or blog is on internet can lead to more followers or fans.
3rd party commenting system is a good one to use if your blog do loads faster than any blogs out there. Those commenting system (3rd party) sometimes droves commenters away. Why? because it adds page load time making the blog load a little long plus some readers see it as too complex to use because of so many buttons available at the comment system.
Me, I am still a fan of the default and oldie but goodie WP commenting system.
Ron, the only reason I can see for someone going to a third party system is to try to prevent spam. I know some folks say it’s for comment control across platforms but I think if people notice the comments on their blogs are decreasing, and if they care, then they wouldn’t stick with it. Of course, it’s always possible that there’s a continuity of community there; so be it.