Imagine if people on HN didn't email an article link to someone, but just @mentioned their name as a comment. With a ranking system like HN's, established comments would rise, but there would still be a ton of crud making it harder to, say, see new comments.
I'd argue that, failing convincing people that it's annoying to do so or changing to the UI to lead people to the "share" function instead, the solution is to filter these kinds of comments out programmatically, showing them only to the sender and recipient(s).
Maybe I've internalized too much agile propaganda, but to me it sounds crazy to assume that people's preferred way to use a product is wrong, especially when adjusting to fit their preferences is so easy.
The proper response is not to tell users to stop. The proper response is to advance how we interpret user behavior.
The fact remains that OP chose to to write an entire article about this, someone chose to share it on HN, and many of us are taking the time to share our opinions in these here comments.
I'm not bothered by any of these things, including the original 'problem' and people using hash tags in real life, but it really fascinates me that other people are (whether they're also being hyperbolic or not).
I'm wondering if this is an age thing, perhaps. I'm in my late twenties and I distinctly remembered being bothered quite often by many things like this that I now consider trivial. At some point I just stopped caring.
I'm trying to 'toot my own horn here', by the way. I get annoyed way too much by other kinds of 'trivialities', like people standing too close to me in public spaces, or people standing in front of public transport vehicle doors without letting others out first. I'm just wondering whether there's any particular logic to how my frustrations shifted over time, and whether the same logic applies to other people.
This is how innovation happens. Retweets, the "@name" sytanx and hashtags all came from people molding the existing system to fit their needs... and Twitter/FB eventually just built them in. This paradigm is proof to Twitter/FB that this needs to be built in. Twitter has recently added the ability to DM tweets; I bet FB is doing something similar.
I don't think I have seen any friends abuse the mentioning ever on Facebook. I can't speak for Twitter since I hardly ever use it.
On popular posts like IFLScience, "at" comments make up the vast majority of comments.
How can we fix this? Well, certainly the next time we build another generation of the Internet we will consult you. In the meantime, perhaps you can get working on an RFC for how people are supposed to use @mention and #hashtag constructions? Do I sense a standards group waiting to be formed (possibly in a church or YMCA basement)?
In my opinion a more constructive comment would be directed at Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Channel X, telling them why consuming their services when people behave this way is noisy and troublesome.
Asking people to change how they behave, especially when that behavior is lazy, seems like it is going to have a low chance of success. Asking the creators of a product to alter how people interact with it, by either changing how information is represented and making the communication less noisy, or dissuading a certain type of behavior, might have better results!
Who does this?
Whenever the only content of a message is names of friends, then they should perform a sharing action without actually posting the message. Then people can decide via a setting if they would or wouldn't not like to see at-messages shown.
This is also the way to share things on Instagram, so if you're used to it, it feels normal to use it on Facebook as well.
