Use an Alias, Leave Better Comments [STUDY]

Interesting to consider as we customize accounts/personas going forward.

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3 days ago by Lauren Indvik 

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                 Commenters who use pseudonyms tend to offer better comments, a study by Disqus suggests.

The study, drawn from commenting platform Disqus’s 60 million-plus user base and nearly half a billion comments, finds that pseudonymous users — that is, those who use an alias on Disqus rather than identify themselves via Facebook, or log in anonymously — tend to leave both a greater quantity and quality of comments. 

Quality was determined by the frequency with which comments were liked, flagged, marked as spam, deleted and responded to.

On average, commenters using an alias contributed 4.7 times more often than commenters identified by Facebook, and 6.5 times more often than anonymous commenters.

Pseudonymous comments also tend to elicit positive reactions (61%) — i.e. likes and/or responses — compared to Facebook-identified users (51%). Not surprisingly, anonymous commenters tend to be the worst. Of the comments analyzed in the study, only 34% were deemed “positive,” while 55% were deemed neutral and another 11% marked negative.


It’s necessary to approach the findings with some reservations, however. Some of Disqus’s data is presented in a way to promote its own system over Facebook’s third-party commenting plugin, which has quickly gained traction among some 400,000 third-party publishers to date. At the end of its infographic on the study, for instance, Disqus points out that pseudonymous commenters account for 61% of all comments, without noting the percentage of such commenters versus those using their (presumably true) Facebook identities.

That said, there’s plenty of evidence to support Disqus’s findings — Reddit’s and Gawker‘s comments sections being prime examples.