Remember when every article had a comments section? When readers could respond directly under stories, argue with each other, and occasionally engage with journalists? That’s mostly gone now. Most major news sites have shut down comments, and nobody seems to miss them much.

Except some people do. There’s a quiet argument happening about whether killing comments sections was necessary moderation or a retreat from public engagement. Whether we lost something valuable or just eliminated cesspools. The answer’s probably both.

Why They Died

Comments sections died for straightforward reasons: they were expensive to moderate, often toxic, and didn’t provide much value to publications pursuing modern business models.

Pre-moderation required staff time most newsrooms couldn’t afford. Post-moderation meant every article’s comments potentially exposed the publication to liability or reputation damage. Automated moderation caught some problems but missed others. No approach worked well at scale.

The quality problem was real. Comments sections on controversial topics became toxic sludge almost immediately. Trolls, spam, personal attacks, racism, threats—all required constant monitoring and cleanup. Even on less controversial articles, the signal-to-noise ratio was terrible.

And comments didn’t drive the metrics publications cared about. Time on site, yes, but mostly from people arguing rather than reading more articles. Ad revenue was limited because advertisers didn’t want to appear next to toxic comment threads. Engagement moved to social media where people shared and discussed articles off-platform.

So publications did the math and killed comments. Save the moderation costs, eliminate the liability, accept that engagement happens elsewhere. From a business perspective, obvious choice.

What Was Lost

But something was lost. At their best—which was rare but real—comments sections created community around publications. Regular commenters got to know each other. Journalists engaged with readers. Local news especially benefited from this community aspect.

Comments also provided immediate reader feedback and additional information. Readers with relevant expertise would add context. People affected by stories would share their experiences. Errors got caught and corrected. The hive mind could add value when it worked.

There was also something democratic about comments sections. Anyone could respond, not just people with social media platforms or the ability to write op-eds. The barrier to entry for public discourse was lower. Whether that was good depends on your view of what public discourse should be.

And for some readers, the comments were the point. They’d skim articles but read comments carefully. The discussion was more interesting than the article itself. That’s probably indictment of either the articles or the readers, but it was real engagement.

The Social Media Replacement

Publications will say engagement just moved to social media. Readers discuss articles on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit. That provides community and conversation without the moderation burden falling on news organizations.

This is partly true but not equivalent. Social media discussion fragments across platforms. It’s not attached to the article itself, so readers who’d benefit from seeing different perspectives or additional context miss it. The conversation scatters instead of aggregating in one place.

Social media also has different dynamics than comments sections. Algorithm-driven feeds mean most people only see reactions from their existing networks, reinforcing bubbles. The conversation self-selects by platform and audience in ways comments sections didn’t.

And journalists can’t easily monitor or engage with fragmented social media discussion the way they could with comments on their own articles. The feedback loop between readers and reporters gets weaker.

What Could Have Been

Some publications tried alternatives before giving up entirely. Gating comments behind registration or subscription. Requiring real names. Limiting comments to certain articles or certain readers. Turning comments off after a time period.

None worked well enough to become standard practice. Each approach had tradeoffs that either reduced engagement too much or didn’t solve moderation problems. The technology and business incentives didn’t support sustainable middle ground.

What might have worked but was too expensive: serious investment in moderation as a core function, with trained staff, clear standards, and real community management. Treating comments as valuable enough to justify significant resources.

A few publications tried this. The results were sometimes good—actual community, productive discussion, reader value. But the costs were high and the business case was weak. Hard to justify when everyone else was shutting comments down and not suffering for it.

The Newsletter Exception

Interestingly, comments are alive and well in newsletters. Substack newsletters often have engaged comment communities. Writers interact with readers directly. The discussion is sometimes higher quality than comments sections ever were.

Why does it work there when it failed for news sites? Smaller scale, self-selected audiences, writers with personal stake in moderation, subscription models that filter for engaged readers. The dynamics are different in ways that make comments viable.

This suggests comments sections could work under different structures—smaller audiences, membership models, journalists taking personal responsibility for their comment communities. But that requires reimagining how news organizations operate, and most aren’t doing that.

Do We Actually Need Them?

The honest question: does public discourse suffer from the loss of comments sections, or did we just lose a bunch of noise?

On one hand, reader engagement with journalism is still happening, just elsewhere. The valuable aspects of comments—community, additional context, reader feedback—exist in other forms. We didn’t lose the function, just the format.

On the other hand, centralizing discussion under articles had value that fragmented social media discussion doesn’t replicate. Making engagement visible to all readers, not just those on specific platforms. Creating space for perspectives that might not have social media platforms. Lowering barriers to participation.

My take: we lost something real, but not clear that what was lost outweighed the costs of maintaining it. Comments sections were good for a small number of engaged readers and occasionally valuable for journalists. They were irrelevant or actively negative for most readers and expensive for publications.

Could They Come Back?

Probably not at scale. The economics that killed them aren’t changing. Moderation remains expensive, and AI moderation isn’t good enough to fully replace humans for nuanced discussion.

What might happen is niche revival—small publications with engaged audiences implementing well-moderated comments as a membership benefit. Treating it as premium feature requiring subscription, with community standards enforced by humans who care.

We’re seeing some of this with newsletters and membership-driven outlets. But it won’t become standard practice for mass-market news. Those economics are solved problems: no comments, engagement happens off-platform, accept that reality.

The Bigger Context

The death of comments sections is part of a broader shift in how readers relate to news organizations. From community members to content consumers. From participants to audience. From ongoing relationships to transactional clicks.

Some of this is inevitable given platform and business model changes. Some of it is choice—news organizations deprioritizing community in favor of scale and efficiency. Comments sections were casualties of that choice, but not the only ones.

Whether you mourn or celebrate their death probably depends on what you think news organizations should be. Community institutions or content producers? Spaces for public discourse or information utilities? The answer shapes whether comments sections feel like a loss or a relief.

Personal Verdict

I don’t miss them much. The good comments were rare enough that the cost wasn’t worth the benefit. The toxicity was real and exhausting. The alternative—discussion happening on social media or in newsletter communities—works fine for most purposes.

But I understand the loss for people who valued that form of engagement. For regular commenters who found community, for journalists who got valuable feedback, for readers who appreciated seeing diverse perspectives. That was real value, even if it didn’t outweigh the costs.

Bring them back? Probably not. Good riddance? Too harsh. More like: they served a purpose that’s now better served by other means, and that’s fine. Not everything needs to be preserved just because it once worked.

The future of reader engagement is probably more like Substack comments and Discord communities than traditional comments sections. Smaller, more intentional, better aligned with business models and community management capacity. Not worse, just different.

And honestly, given what most comments sections became before they died, different might be an improvement.