Hey, Max. Good to see you here. I disagree. I think removing comments is a perfectly reasonable and even forward-thinking thing to do. I actually wrote a thing on TC a while back that, amazingly, you didn't comment on:
The truth as I see it is that comments are only there because they're expected, while communities and discussion are no longer limited to the comment section, and in fact better communities and discussion are had nearly everywhere else. I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service.
Apropos of this discussion, the reason I didn't comment on that article was because TechCrunch had switched to LiveFyre, which was barely functional.
I mention that because TechCrunch switched to LiveFyre, ironically, to help promote quality discussion. In fact, it made discussion on TechCrunch worse, as it encouraged anonymous troll comments instead of those under a Facebook identity: http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/
TechCrunch eventually switched back to Facebook comments. Again, there isn't a perfect solution to comment quality, but there are options.
Oh brother, don't even get me started on that shit. We told their asses not to move to LiveFyre, and we told them not to move to Facebook. I think LiveFyre was Erick's move (may have made sense at the time) and we switched to FB to try it out when it first went live (more happened later). We had outage problems with Disqus before that, which is why we never went back to them (I thought we should). Anyway believe me no one was happy with the comments situation for as long as I was there, and I don't mean that to reflect poorly in any way on anyone I worked with, it was just a weird setup.
> "I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service."
I think the salient point regarding people having those discussions on social media is that each of us controls our own social media connections. If I share an article on my FB page and someone makes an inane comment, I can delete it. If they make an outrageous comment, I can unfriend or block them (potentially after a warning.) I can get plenty of high-quality perspectives from my friends, but without the down side of the psychos shouting into a megaphone.
The only "advantage" to having comments directly on the main article is that I can potentially see perspectives none of my friends happen to hold -- but I can do that reading the comments on Reuter's FB page too, and then I have a persistent block function I can use on the most obnoxious of the obnoxious.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/shouts-and-murmurations/
The truth as I see it is that comments are only there because they're expected, while communities and discussion are no longer limited to the comment section, and in fact better communities and discussion are had nearly everywhere else. I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service.