But moderating them more aggressively might.
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2014 was a year of reckoning for online news media. Following increasingly fractious and aggressive behavior by users, a number of marquee organizations threw their collective hands up and shut down their comments sections. Within weeks of each other, Recode, The Week, USA Today and Reuters joined with Popular Science and The Chicago Sun-Times in announcing that they would be shuttering their public forums in favor of holding those discussions on other social channels.
"If I was painting a picture of a site we were gonna have, and then at the end I said, 'Oh, by the way, at the bottom of all our articles we're going to prominently let any pseudonymous avatar do and say whatever they want with no moderation' — if there was no convention of internet commenting, if it wasn't this thing that was accepted, you would think that was a crazy idea," Ben Frumin, editor-in-chief of The Week, told Nieman Lab in 2015. In the half-decade since, comments sections have somehow persisted. But in an age of omnipresent Social Media, does the internet still need a comment section at all?
The comments section is, by definition, driven by the readers that use it to express their reactions and opinions to news articles, often via pseudonymous or fully anonymous accounts. This format works both to the advantage and detriment of news sites.
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