The Comment Section Was a Mistake, and We Should Say So

When comment sections first arrived on news sites, they were pitched as a democratizing force — a way for readers to talk back to the press, to correct errors in real time, to build something like a public square underneath every article.

That is not what most of them became.

What actually happened

In practice, comment sections rewarded the fastest and angriest responses, not the most informed ones. Newsrooms that once saw them as a service to readers increasingly saw them as a moderation burden with little editorial upside — which is why so many quietly disabled them over the last decade.

The honest alternative

Readers who want to respond to our work can still write to us directly, and the best of those letters inform our coverage far more than an open comment thread ever did. That is not a lesser form of engagement. It is, if anything, the more serious one — and outlets should stop pretending that giving it up was a loss for public discourse rather than a fairly small correction.