11 ms·
A Brief History of the End of the Comments
- thescribe 11y agoNo 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 11y agoThat'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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoProviding a comments section doesn't mean your "dogma" is open to "challenge" any more than any other form of contact offered.
- sparkzilla 11y agoAs 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 11y agonewspapers existed for centuries without comment sections, i think the mode of propagation will survive
- jedmeyers 11y agohorse carriages existed for centuries without the engines, i think the mode of transportation will survive.
- codingdave 11y agoIt has. Go visit Amish country. Or come out west where people still ride horses around the small towns.
- protomyth 11y agoNewspapers 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.
- interpol_p 11y agoIt's not a matter of not wanting people to engage. It's a matter of not wanting to provide a platform for engagement when the web itself is that platform. I read a lot of blogs which disallow comments. Their engagement comes through linking other blogs and responding, or linking tweets. I wouldn't call it arrogance to disallow comments. It's a matter of encouraging people to create their own platforms from which to respond. (That said, I have nothing against comments and think comment-first sites like this one are valuable. But not every site needs to provide a platform for engagement or risk being called arrogant.)
- mynameishere 11y agoNews 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 11y agoNever heard of Google Sidewiki before. What was the discussion quality like generally?
- Animats 11y agoHere'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-for-content-blocking/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-principles...
- firebones 11y agoBenefit: any follower of that hashtag (including Mozilla) can block an offensive commenter (no need for universal moderation--you can choose whatever level of freedom/inanity/bile you wish.) Classic Clay Shirky "publish then filter" dynamics, with the crowd getting to tune their own personal filter. That approach actually seems enlightened--commenters own their own comments, readers own their filters, and if Mozilla wishes, it can curate the best of the best and amplify (say, with retweets or something like Storify).
- welanes 11y agoFeels disjointed having to jump to another platform. Is it possible / would it be better to show the Twitter feed with that hashtag below the articles?
- notahacker 11y agoSounds 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 11y agoYes. From the Foundation's perspective, it weakens opposition.
- Animats 11y ago
- steve371 11y agoAs 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.
- pervycreeper 11y agoAll 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.
- transfire 11y agoI avoid sites that do not allow comments.
- ngrilly 11y agoWhy?
- hayksaakian 11y agoto me it's like going to an ecommerce website that does not have product reviews
- ngrilly 11y agoFunny 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 11y agoSame here. If there was a lack of sites on the Internet I would do without comments, of course. But as there are plenty of news sites for any given region/topic, I'm just stopping using those that don't allow comments. I think the interaction provided by comments is one of the strongest advantages of news and blogs with respect to traditional media and removing it is a step backwards. Relying on solutions like Twitter for the comments isn't the same thing. Apart from the 140-character limit that I've never liked, tweets are ephemeral and are soon lost in the information sea, apart from depending on a third party that could decide to delete them or restrict access when they like. I prefer the comments to reside with the news, where they belong.
- crusso 11y agoI don't avoid sites that don't allow comments, but I tend to prefer ones that do.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- lips 11y agoI'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.)
- intopieces 11y agoI 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.
- jane_is_here 11y agoAt the Financial Times site, much of the value is comments by the readers, many of whom are active in the industry.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThat'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?
- coldtea 11y ago>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.
- mdevere 11y agoStrongly 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-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-w...