I get aggravated at seeing these comments too, but I'm not surprised why they don't use the 'formalized' routes for sharing. Tagging someone in the comments is the path of least resistance, and people have acclimated to it—and at this point, it's hard to change because the incentive to change would be to keep a comments section clean, which people don't really care about.<p>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).
The thing is, on Facebook if you post something it may or may not appear in a friend's stream. If you know of a specific person who would benefit from seeing something, at-ing that person makes sure that they see it. Maybe Facebook should add a new field to signal that someone would be interested or hide @mentions of other people in comments, but you can't really blame the user for this.
Despite agreeing it's annoying, I'm going to push back.<p>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.
This is just an indication that neither facebook nor twitter has implemented an obvious feature:<p>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.
I don't quite understand the OP - I just used Facebook's mentioning feature a few days ago on a big status update reviewing antics with friends for the couple of days prior. I mentioned ~50 friends in the post, it was a great time for all involved, and everyone was happy with it. I also mentioned friends in comments I didn't get to hang out with during the weekend.<p>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.
I agree at-ing people is really annoying. They can easily make up 90%+ of the comments on popular posts like IFLScience. But the flip side is popular posts have such low quality comments that even if you took the time to dig past all the at's, you wouldn't find much of value. So I find the real solution is to just ignore comments on Facebook.
I think this habit comes from a desire to have everyone on the same comment thread. On FB at least, I don't think there's a better way to do that, and it's hard to imagine a better system to, say, share comment threads between posts, while allowing people to have control of what's on their feed and not confusing the living daylights out of them. Anyway, I don't buy that it's a strictly useless behavior.
I don't use FB, but I do use twitter (and slack plays into this also as I use it with friends) but you (the subscriber) always control the channel and the attention you give it. Kill your inbound channel, once that's done people will give up using it as a communication mechanism to get an idea to you.
I am really, really sorry you don't like how social communication channels are evolving. It's a bummer that other people aren't using the Internet the way you want.<p>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)?
as markbao says this is the fastest way to share the link.<p>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.