- x Foman123 x
- |
- Master Forum Ninja
- gamertag: [none]
- user homepage:
TL;DR summary:
Sure, why not, but solely for commenting on news posts and articles. Absolutely not for forums.
Obviously, we as a community want to be inviting to everybody, but this is accomplished through the act of making it easy to make an account for posting, not by making it easy to post. Being "inviting" to a person who wants to be here is not the same thing as "making it easy for a disinterested user to add content." The former results in a better site and a better community while the latter does the opposite.
Longer version
For pure commenting on articles, news posts, and the like: fine. This is far less about community participation than about making one's voice heard, and this could make sense for news post/article commenting.
For participation in the forums and creating/joining private groups: absolutely not.
You may have noticed, daz, that a lot of people have concerns about additional difficulties in moderation and a decline in the quality of discussion here (which, at times, can already be pretty low). While you focus on the technical issues involved in moderating comments here and the obvious fact that any system allowing posts by social media users would almost certainly include a way to moderate them, I think that these concerns are far more about a feeling that this feature would result in a huge decline in the quality of content regardless of how much we moderate. For a pretty good microcosm, I'd compare the differential between the quality of discussion and frequency of spam on our "public" forums with that of a closed private group on Bungie.net.
Personally, I think these concerns are well-founded and they are a legitimate reason to be against this feature.
The fact is that in cruising around the internet, many of us have noted that sites which allow this feature suffer from incredibly low-quality conversation, trolling, mass spam, commercial posts, and other undesirable comments/posts. This is because users who use this feature to comment are typically not invested in the site. While their Facebook account certainly has value to them, the ability to post on Bungie.net to a user like this is of negligible importance. What do they care if they get banned? They are visiting BNet as part of their social media experience on Facebook or Twitter, and any participation in the site via adding content is done in that context. They have zero vested interest in contributing to the Bungie.net community or maintaining the integrity of their account. A 7-day ban has no effect on a user who only posts here once a month.
The typical user who actually creates an account here has the opposite motivation. The act of creating an account, in itself, adds solemnity and seriousness to the act of participating in the forums, and as such, results in an increase in the quality of discussion.
Users who, as you say in your OP, are "people who follow Bungie's Twitter or Facebook accounts where they are sent links to articles posted on this site and want to comment on them, but aren't interested in any of the other features you get with a Bungie.net account" are low-value users nearly by definition. Just like the difference between our public forums and a closed private group on Bungie.net, the easier it is to get access to adding content, the lower the quality of that content will be.
In all honesty, it is not difficult to create an account here, and trying to make the idea of creating an account sound cumbersome flies directly in the face of what we know about problem users and alternate accounts.
Like burritosenior said, it makes far more sense to establish a system of adding value to a Bungie.net account (and motivation to only have one of them) than to make it a zero-step process for disengaged and disinterested users to post.
[Edited on 04.22.2012 11:18 PM PDT]