I posted this inspired by a recent comment about ... comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653845). De

I posted this inspired by a recent comment about ... comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653845). Der Spiegel effectively terminated comments to specific articles and replaced them by a central place called "Debatte" (debate) where you can discuss matters in a heavily moderated place. You can't even start a new conversation but can propose a new topic for debate when you have enough "karma". The editors then decide whether to open up your proposal to general debate. I guess it's a lot of work to moderate all comments when there are lot of toxic comments (although the Vox Coral forum software allows to use Perspective API) but still think it's a loss not to have a free/open possibility to comment on a specific article. Also former commenters lost all of their former contributions and can't access them any longer. The German Süddeutsche Zeitung has given up on comments quite a while ago. There are still comments in Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as far as I know. EDIT: I also heavily editorialized the title of the submitted article because they tried not to make a big deal of the transition and buried it in the general community guidelines.