A Brief History of the End of the Comments

As the first person in the world to put comments directly under news stories (japantoday.com), I am appalled by the excuses that sites give to stop their comment sections. For example, the Daily Beast said they were stopping comments because of the trolls, yet there were plenty of good commenters on there. What about them? This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls, which is not actually all that difficult, and the arrogance of some journalists who simply don&#x27;t want their opinions to be questioned. I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they don&#x27;t want you to engage.<p>I&#x27;ve always found that the commenters are the core of the community and they will come back time and time again to discuss the issues and add extra context and meaning. They give sites life. Life is messy, but we deal with it. These sites seem to think they can offload the work to Facebook, but all they are doing is losing their community, the people, and the spark. They should know that Facebook doesn&#x27;t care about their community -- it only cares about Facebook, and will screw them as soon as it can.

Strongly dislike this trend. Comments are audit in a badly-regulated industry. Open discussion of content will undoubtedly play a role in the future of journalism. This is clearly a step backwards, not forwards.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is really about trolls for trolling&#x27;s sake. I think this is about being called out on sloppy content.<p>We all know that online journalism is a seriously tough business, especially for anyone trying to maintain some sort of reputation for quality. For these guys, it&#x27;s economically infeasible to make sure every article is high quality because the headline is &lt;insert very big number here&gt; times more important than the body and there are plenty of competitors taking advantage of that.<p>So when a site starts publishing empty content because they feel that they have to, comments are rightfully merciless on calling BS. Writers get demoralised and publications look for ways to save face. As pointed out, removing a comments section is far preferable to heavily moderating against unfavourable comments. But still, I hate the trend we&#x27;re seeing.<p>The Verge is an interesting one. They selectively open comments but many articles remain closed. It&#x27;s not entirely clear how they decide which articles to open but there at least seems to be a tendency to open comments on the longform stuff they&#x27;re proud of.<p>Longer term, everyone is looking for a model where quality is rewarded or at least some sort of rebalancing for the internet publishing economy. Blendle wrote a nice article about their experience getting consumers to pay: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;on-blendle&#x2F;blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;on-blendle&#x2F;blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...</a>

Here&#x27;s an amusing example: Mozilla&#x27;s blog no longer allows comments.[1] But they&#x27;re asking for comments. So they write: &quot;Tell us what you think of these proposed principles on your social channels using #contentblocking and join us on Friday October 9 at 11am PT for our #BlockParty, a conversation around the problems and possible solutions to the content blocking question.&quot; So they&#x27;re sending people to Twitter to comment?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;proposed-principles-for-content-blocking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;07&#x2F;proposed-principles...</a>

No matter what side of an issue a &#x27;true believer&#x27; is on they do not like having their dogma challenged. In the modern web comments have frequently played that role, so, it is no wonder that comments are dying out.<p>Of course, no one will say that is why their own comment section is going away. There is always some high-minded reason why they shouldn&#x27;t have comments. It doesn&#x27;t hurt that comments aren&#x27;t advertiser safe. Protecting a brand runs counter to having open comments.

As a good old fashion user. I want to read reliable,solid and critical thinking news and able to read&amp;write comments on a single page.<p>I am OK if they just handle over the IT cost to social media, and just simply swap their original comments section UNDER EACH news pieces to facebook&#x2F;Twitter.<p>But if they give up the comments at all, then why not just shutdown the whole site and open a twitter account to post news.

I&#x27;m excited to see what the Motherboard Letters experiment turns up. I honestly can&#x27;t recall the last comment section I read that added to the discussion. Aside from hot-button political or social issues with their associated vitriol, even technical videos or software reviews are cluttered with useless claptrap. Maybe I read the wrong sites. But when I was a heavier dead-paper consumer, I absolutely enjoyed the letters section of quite a few periodicals.<p>I think punting to social media is... uninvested. I enjoy twitter more as an index of links, rather than actual convo. Facebook, meh. It&#x27;s facebook - a conversation mediated by an ever-shifting overlord that I don&#x27;t care to participate in. But neither of them are lauded as interlocution par excellence, last I checked.<p>The big question for me is how the issue of engagement plays out. Comments update in realtime, letters assume you&#x27;re familiar with the antecedent article.<p>Either which way, I think it&#x27;s about time we saw more experimentation in this area.<p>(I&#x27;m glad I had the opportunity to read a page full of people projecting their own egos, conspiracies, and neurosis on this very article.)

I avoid sites that do not allow comments.

I used to think the magic fix for comment sections was linking them to a concrete identity. Then I see pages where people post deliberately offensive remarks with their name on it, and I decided that most websites don&#x27;t need a comments section. It seems to work better in smaller communities than the entire Internet.

At the Financial Times site, much of the value is comments by the readers, many of whom are active in the industry.

That&#x27;s interesting. What I&#x27;ve heard (arguably second-handedly, but still) is that news sites purposefully troll in their own comments sections in order to create a heated argument - which means more people interacting, viewing pages and thus viewing the ads. What&#x27;s changed?

All of these isolated occurrences do not seem to add up to any kind of single trend. Upvoted for instance funnels into reddit, which is a commenting board par excellence. It wouldn&#x27;t make sense to have comments on any kind of &quot;reddit Digest&quot;. There is a slightly disturbing trend involving sites which try to push an agenda banning comments, but the choice of examples in this article obscures that particular issue.

&gt;<i>While it’s too soon to say that comment sections are outright dying— there are plenty of major sites that still have comments, including WIRED—it’s safe to say there’s a trend towards replacing them with something else. Here’s a brief history of major publications pulling the plug on comments.</i><p>In other words: something that the most active readers of a website enjoy and others can just ignore is taken out by online publications.

News outlets don&#x27;t want their bullshit called out. Full stop.<p>A general solution to the problem has <i>got</i> to happen, but it&#x27;s been tried many times before and always failed. (Biggest failure <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Sidewiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_Sidewiki</a>). Godspeed to whomever does it right.