>It's not the same as commanding them not to discuss in general anywhere, but IT IS shuting them up from discussion in your (the site owner's I mean) premises.

>It's not the same as commanding them not to discuss in general anywhere, but IT IS shuting them up from discussion in your (the site owner's I mean) premises. Essentially the message is "I don't like how you are discussing, and I'm stopping you from discussing here anymore". The thing is that that's (a news site comment section) is the only place that all readers of it can discuss it as a community -- the only place that's not disjointed (each own's blog, some social news link site, etc) and the place that guarantess more than any other that readers of the same news piece have a chance to see those comments, and that the writer and outlet will see them too (and publicly). Yeah, but they don't owe anyone that. You're positing some duty to provide space for conversation, apparently based on the fact that some sites have provided that space in the past. That's essentially an appeal to tradition while ignoring the actual reality of comments on the internet, which is that A) they almost never contribute meaningfully to a site, B) the only way we've found to create meaningful comment sections is through labor-intensive human moderation that most sites don't want to pay for (and have no duty to pay for), and C) in place of meaningful discussion, most un- or lightly-moderated comment sections are full of terrible people saying terrible things. I'm going to repeat something I said downthread, but no one is preventing anyone from having a voice online. They're just saying that they don't have to publish your voice if they don't want to. You're arguing that the NYT/CNN/$FILL_IN_ORG have some moral duty to provide a space for people to have conversations on their site, about their content, without putting any limits on what is said. You're not describing it that way, because once you confront the reality of that, it becomes ridiculous. Comments, in that sense, aren't "a letter to the editor", they're "I get to tell the editor to publish something and he can't decline." And yeah, having to go read it on your own blog might make the reading experience "disjointed" (whatever that means - clicking a pingback link is about as low-friction as I can imagine in terms of finding pieces responding to the original, especially placed in any kind of historical context), but that's your problem, not the person or organization publishing something. They don't owe you engagement; if you want to engage, make your own site and build your own audience. You don't just get to piggyback on someone else's success to broadcast your thoughts because you want to.