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

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.)