Dear Facebook: You Are Not Reddit. Here Are Three Reasons Why Your Comment Reordering Is Terrible!

“Reddit-wannabe” Facebook recently made two changes to how comments are handled on popular Pages and individual profiles with more than 10,000 fans. The reply feature is not bad, but the reordering of comments is terrible.

The two changes are:

1. A “Reply” link has been added to comments. When you reply, your comment is added in a sub-thread under the original comment. When viewing the whole comment thread, these sub-comments are collapsed and not visible until you click to expand them.

2. First-level comments are no longer in chronological order, with the newest comments on the bottom. Instead, they are ranked by some secret algorithm that factors in how many likes the comment has, if it is by your friend, if you’ve replied to the comment, and other measures that we aren’t told. The theory is that the comments you are most interested in will be at the top.

I recently made my first post after enabling this feature, and I actually got to see it in action and use it: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151421606609342

Here is what I’ve noticed, and why this new system is terrible:

It’s impossible to check for new comments
As a Page owner, I keep a tab open with my recent post in it, and I refresh it often to see new comments that have been added. This is no longer possible, since comments may appear anywhere in the list. This is the worst problem. Instead of helping me manage the conversation and reply to users, I have now completely lost the ability to do so.
- **Collapsed comments take too many clicks
  ** Now with replies, I have to click a lot of places just to see all the comments. This is not convenient at all, compared to before when I could just scroll down to make sure I saw everything.
  - New replies will go unnoticed
    ** Before, new replies to previous comments would appear at the bottom. Now they are hidden under an ‘expand’ link, and there is no way for me to know if there are new comments in the reply thread. I have to expand each one and try to remember how many replies it had last time. Totally unmanageable.</ol> Is it me, or does it seem like **Facebook has some kind of hatred for all things chronological? It wants to sort our news feed by what it thinks is most important, and now it wants to do the same for comments.
  Very bad change, Facebook. Terrible. Please change it back, or give Page owners the option of keeping the threaded comments, but leaving everything in chronological order. Otherwise, you are going to kill a lot of interaction.
  
  – Matt Kruse, developer of Social Fixer