Raise commenting on Facebook: target users, barriers, prioritized ideas and quality metrics

You are a product manager at Meta working on Facebook. How would you get people to write more comments on Facebook posts? Explain which users and which kinds of posts you would focus on, what keeps people from commenting today, which ideas you would pursue first, and how you would measure success. ```hint Follow one comment's life Trace the steps from seeing a post to writing a comment, and what happens after it is posted, from the side of both the reader and the post's author. Each place where people drop out points to a different kind of fix. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which posts are in scope: personal posts from friends, posts in Groups, posts from Pages and creators, or all of these? - Why does the team want more comments now: is comment volume falling, flat while other engagement grows, or is this a growth push, and is there a target lift and time frame? - Does every comment count, or should one-word replies, spam and comments that get hidden or reported be excluded from success? - Is this for all countries and for both the app and the website, or for a particular market or platform? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Why comments matter to Facebook (conversation between people, feedback that encourages authors to keep posting, a signal for ranking) and a definition of the kind of comment worth growing. - A reasoned segment choice among readers who rarely interact, people who react but do not comment, regular commenters and post authors, with the size of each opportunity. - Barriers tied to the commenting journey, such as posts that do not invite a reply, typing effort on mobile, the social risk of commenting in public, unanswered comments and notification overload after commenting. - Prioritized ideas that work on both the reader side and the author side, with impact and effort weighed. - Metrics that pair comment volume with quality, and guardrails for spam, harassment, engagement bait and notification fatigue. ### Follow-up Questions - Your best idea raises comment counts, but a larger share of the new comments get hidden or reported. Do you launch it? - Suggested one-tap replies would be cheap to build and would lift comment counts quickly. What are the risks, and how would you decide? - A comment changes what the author and the commenter's friends see next. How would you design an experiment that accounts for that?