
A Brief History of the End of the Comments - kp25
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/brief-history-of-the-demise-of-the-comments-timeline
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sparkzilla
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't want their
opinions to be questioned. I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they
don't want you to engage.

I'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't care about their community -- it only cares about
Facebook, and will screw them as soon as it can.

~~~
nyolfen
newspapers existed for centuries without comment sections, i think the mode of
propagation will survive

~~~
protomyth
Newspapers have long had letters to the editor and published essays sent their
way. A famous example being the Constitution debate in the US with the
publishing of what came to be called the Federalist and Anti-Federalist
papers.

~~~
firebones
And plenty of sites follow that model without requiring comment sections. And
they're better for it.

~~~
protomyth
Letters to the editor is a heavily moderated comment section.

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mdevere
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.

I don't think this is really about trolls for trolling's sake. I think this is
about being called out on sloppy content.

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's economically infeasible to make sure every article is high quality
because the headline is <insert very big number here> times more important
than the body and there are plenty of competitors taking advantage of that.

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're seeing.

The Verge is an interesting one. They selectively open comments but many
articles remain closed. It'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're proud of.

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:
[https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-
experiment-w...](https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-
with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc)

------
Animats
Here's an amusing example: Mozilla's blog no longer allows comments.[1] But
they're asking for comments. So they write: "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." So they're
sending people to Twitter to comment?

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-
principles...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-principles-
for-content-blocking/)

~~~
notahacker
Sounds like a smart idea to me. Instead of having their page clogged with
comments (some of them probably snarky ones) they get a crowdsourced social
media campaign. I don't think Twitter's a great medium for reasoned debate on
principles, but I can see the appeal to the Mozilla Foundation.

~~~
Animats
Yes. From the Foundation's perspective, it weakens opposition.

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thescribe
No matter what side of an issue a 'true believer' 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.

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't have
comments. It doesn't hurt that comments aren't advertiser safe. Protecting a
brand runs counter to having open comments.

~~~
trowawee
That's claptrap. Comments on 99.9% of websites are a pointless cesspool. If
someone wants to scream racism or misogyny at other people, they can fire up
Wordpress and make their own crappy blog. No one has some moral duty to give
the diseased gums of humanity somewhere to spew their garbage thoughts, and
ginning up some argument about comments being a space for telling truth to
power is prima facie ridiculous to anyone who's spent 20 minutes on the
internet.

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steve371
As a good old fashion user. I want to read reliable,solid and critical
thinking news and able to read&write comments on a single page.

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/Twitter.

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.

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lips
I'm excited to see what the Motherboard Letters experiment turns up. I
honestly can'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.

I think punting to social media is... uninvested. I enjoy twitter more as an
index of links, rather than actual convo. Facebook, meh. It's facebook - a
conversation mediated by an ever-shifting overlord that I don't care to
participate in. But neither of them are lauded as interlocution par
excellence, last I checked.

The big question for me is how the issue of engagement plays out. Comments
update in realtime, letters assume you're familiar with the antecedent
article.

Either which way, I think it's about time we saw more experimentation in this
area.

(I'm glad I had the opportunity to read a page full of people projecting their
own egos, conspiracies, and neurosis on this very article.)

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transfire
I avoid sites that do not allow comments.

~~~
ngrilly
Why?

~~~
hayksaakian
to me it's like going to an ecommerce website that does not have product
reviews

~~~
ngrilly
Funny comparison :-)

That said, it's a little bit different. When you plan to buy something, the
advice of past buyers is really helpful. But when you read something, you
usually don't need other people advice to extract value from what you read.

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intopieces
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't need a
comments section. It seems to work better in smaller communities than the
entire Internet.

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

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TeMPOraL
That's interesting. What I'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's changed?

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pervycreeper
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't make sense to have comments on any kind of "reddit
Digest". 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.

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coldtea
> _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._

In other words: something that the most active readers of a website enjoy and
others can just ignore is taken out by online publications.

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mynameishere
News outlets don't want their bullshit called out. Full stop.

A general solution to the problem has _got_ to happen, but it's been tried
many times before and always failed. (Biggest failure
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sidewiki)).
Godspeed to whomever does it right.

~~~
pervycreeper
Never heard of Google Sidewiki before. What was the discussion quality like
generally?

