Eric Goldstein dedicated a blog post today trying to explain why Amplify requires people to join Amplify in order to be able to comment on a post
He failed.
Not for lack of trying, here are his points:
1. Minimize spam. When we first went live with Amplify, we did allow logged out commenting. As you can imagine, the instances of spam (loosely defined) was pretty high. This got reduced greatly when we changed to only allow comments by logged in users.I wholeheartedly agree with no. 1 - Spammers never add any value, period. They should be banned everywhere, and this is a good measure to try and do so
2. The user experience on Amplify is highly dependent upon building a network of people you choose to interact with. Activity by logged out users would fall outside that experience, so I personally find it a bit inconsistent. Given that all you need to do to comment is login with either your Twitter or Facebook account, I don’t see that being a lot to ask for.
3. Assuming that you clicked through from Twitter or Facebook, if you don’t want to login to Amplify, you can always post your comment on those respective services, so i don’t feel that our decision is preventing people from being able to respond to each other.
I'm having trouble with the first sentence on no. 2 - hey guys I just want to comment on a post. I don't care for a user experience on Amplify. Other than that, I agree with the rest
I absolutely disagree with no. 3 - simply because it isn't true
Here's what I got, when trying to comment to a post by Dennis Howlett earlier today:
No problem whatsoever with that, it's the usual experience when allowing another application to authenticate you via Twitter. However, having been redirected to where you came from, here's what you get:
Welcome to Amplify? Hey I just authenticated myself in order to comment on some blog post, I didn't register for your service! I have to set my Amplify page? WHAT?! Oh and then there's the TOS I have to accept (and read first)
Listen, Amplify. This is close to SPAM, if not SPAM itself
"i don’t feel that our decision is preventing people from being able to respond to each other"? Well I do, and so will a whole bunch of other people
