It's probably somewhat tied to the article at hand, ironically. E.g. when you see a low-effort "water is wet" article, the primal urge is to leave a low-effort

It's probably somewhat tied to the article at hand, ironically. E.g. when you see a low-effort "water is wet" article, the primal urge is to leave a low-effort comment and move on with your life. There's almost no benefit to discussing these articles, because the points have already been made, hashed, and re-hashed hundreds of times. In other words, the value add of this article to me is 0. Media's been collapsing for a while now, because technology makes a lot of markets into winner-take-all markets, with a LOT of losers like local newspapers and below-average quality independent journalists.