I am painfully aware of the limitations of Facebook commenting. If you’re still having trouble commenting, read “You don’t need Facebook to comment.” A comment FAQ is coming.
Climate Progress will immediately take four steps to make better use of the talents of our amazing commenters.
First, rest assured, the 120,000 (!) comments on Climate Progress from before the merger with Think Progress still exist. I apologize that they were taken down temporarily without warning. That was as big a shock to me as it was to anyone. We are figuring out the best way to make them available and, equally important, to draw attention to the best comment streams (more on that soon).
Second, here’s a new feature we are implementing as of today: If a post gets a comment that is worthy of drawing attention to, we will put it in the body of the post.
I just did that for a comment (in the great Heidi Cullen post) from one of our long-time readers, Richard Brenne, a leading climate communicator.
UPDATE: I just added a featured comment for this post from Ted Gleichman.I can’t guarantee every post will get a featured comment — or that your terrific comment will get featured — but I can guarantee that Stephen Lacey and I will be reading all the comments closely to pick out some gems. Obviously, comments within the first few hours are likelier to be featured. Whether or not we feature more than one comment is to be decided.
If we use your comment, we will also activate any links — don’t get me started on how lame it is FB doesn’t have that 10-year-old standard feature yet (but their system was really only launched in March, so I’m hopeful they will get on the ball soon — we are certainly complaining to them).
If you think someone wrote a great comment, please respond to it and we will take notice.
Third, in addition, every week on Saturday we will collect some of the best comments and put them in a stand-alone post, “Best comments of the week.”
Fourth, if a comment is really incisive and well-written, we may ask you if you want to actually turn it into a guest post.
Finally, feel free to complain about the uber-lame FB commenting system — Lord knows that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days. All complaints will be passed on. BUT most of those issues are in the hands of FB and unlikely to change very soon.
Also some new people love it, as this comment from yesterday make’s clear:
This is the coolest way to post comments I have ever seen!
A major reason I did this merger is that I am trying to reach new people. Some 600 million are on FB.
That’s why I would find it much more helpful if you could make suggestions for how to better utilize the existing system and/or propose ideas like the ones above.
FEATURED COMMENT:
Ted Gleichman · Portland, Oregon A couple of things that may be worth remembering:
1) The best-ever analysis of FB was the point that “we are not their customers, we are their product.” Also true for Google, Apple, etc. So the relative loss of privacy is inherent in the cyber-process, no matter how it’s structured. I don’t especially like that, but it’s OK because…
2)… we are engaged here in literally trying to save the world, and it’s not going very well (! ). I decided long ago that I would only post under my own name because the stakes are so high. And this transition is very helpful in outing the disguised deniers and — this is critically important — helping the like-minded to find each other and work to build community. In that same vein…
3)… I was thrilled with the Think Progress merger because only through unifying and building community will we have any real prospect of preserving civilization for the remnant that survives in a century.
These glitches and tweaks totally fall under non-sweatable small (and maybe medium-sized) stuff. But no worries: there will be sweat enough to go around over the next few years and decades. Thank you, Joe.
There are many negative comments below that are worth reading, too. I would be interested in hearing from more people who can’t blow up the font size using the “+” key and “command” or “control.” I can do that in Firefox and Safari.