The mystery to me is why sites like the Washington Post have a comments section at all. Think of the time and money they spent implementing and running it, poss

The mystery to me is why sites like the Washington Post have a comments section at all. Think of the time and money they spent implementing and running it, possibly requiring the most technical effort out of their entire publishing endeavor. All to get tons of horrible garbage dumped at the bottom of their pages every minute of the day. Tons of high traffic sites have these wild west zones at the bottom of their otherwise tightly controlled articles. They have next to no oversight, there are barely any technical barriers to prevent abuse, and yet they still command a significant portion of the main content's reach. This is absolutely not lost on people who want to promote certain views loudly, quickly and cheaply. I really doubt that all (or even most) of the comments on a site like the Washington Post's are actual people who actually think those things. But somebody does, and some people will start to find those views more acceptable when they see them everywhere at once.