What we lost when we lost comments

Maybe we should blame WordPress for the death of comments.

The blogging platform that taught the world to publish online was ill-equipped for the speed of the web. Your site could get Slashdotted or Fireballed or hugged to death, as colloquialisms sprung up for sites that flew too close to the sun. The longer your backlog, the larger your audience, the slower your site got.

As did the moderation burden. You had to sift between legitimate comments, seemingly nice comments that were merely a sneaky way to add a link, well-intended linkbacks with mentions from other sites, and outright spam. Easier to turn off comments, or move to a blog that ran faster but didn’t support comments at all.

And then there was the allure of social media. It’d start, perhaps, when someone shared your post with commentary, and suddenly you gained followers and page views without any additional work. What if you could outsource the whole thing to social networks, ask people to reply on Twitter or Facebook, and both grow your following and escape the moderation burden at the same time?

That ended well.

Social networks rise and fall on how long they can keep people in their apps. Reed Hastings famously said that Netflix competes with sleep. Letting people click away to your site is a loss for a network that’d rather keep people in their app. Queue suppressed links and a breaking of the supposed social contract that made outsourcing comments appealing in the first place.

Which means it’s time to bring comments back.

A conversation, or chaos

Comments were de rigueur on blogs and news sites alike, until suddenly they weren’t. Popular Science in late 2013 made one of the first high-profile moves to turn off comments, according to Wired’s timeline; CNN had followed suit by the following spring, Reuters for all but opinion posts by November 2014.

“We believe that social media is the new arena for commenting, replacing the old onsite approach that dates back many years,” wrote Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, optimistically, when they turned off comments on Recode. “It’s not clear why comments are a particularly good part of the [website] experience,” explained Swisher to Nieman Lab about the decision.

The problem, more than spam, was that culture posts, things that sparked debate, would surge in popularity thanks to comments, as The Verge’s Nilay Patel explained to Nieman Lab. But the comments were a battlefield, not bastion of community. Little loss if you kicked the flame warriors out to continue their melee on social networks. That, and as Popular Science online director Carl Franzen explained, “Many of our readers already use social media to read and share science news, so moving more of our engagement to where they are now just makes perfect sense.”

Only, the audience stayed on the social network. While correlation does not equal causation, publishing didn’t need yet another thing that made people less inclined to visit. PopSci’s circulation dropped by a quarter in the two years after dropping comments. The print magazine died in 2020; the online magazine shuttered three years later.

Which is about the time that sites started turning comments back on. Nieman Lab, following up on their earlier report about the death of comments, talked to newsrooms who were dipping their toes back in the waters. The Seattle Times was enabling comments on most stories, just not those “of a sensitive nature.” Occasionally, they’d ask for comments ahead of time, and work them into the story. The Boston Globe, in a similar vein, hired a community engagement editor to keep comments civil and constructive. Germany’s Der Spiegel turned comments into debates, since people liked flame wars so much anyhow; anyone could view the takeaways, while commenting was reserved for paid subscribers.

Therein lay a path forward.

Bad behavior was out, obviously, and should be policed. Bad actors should be banned. The ability to comment should hinge on membership, paid perhaps, attached perhaps to real identities visible at least to the moderating team. And speaking of moderation, the team should treat comments as a two-way road, incorporating their feedback into future work and replying where appropriate, and weeding out the troublemakers in the process.

And so the rebuilding began.

Community from comments

There was always something appealing about comments, from their earliest print form in letters to the editor, then the commentary they inspired. The Times of London’s communities editor Ben Whitelaw wistfully recalled when a reader called their comments “the most civilized dumpster fire on the internet,” while also remarking that comments often inspired columnists with new ideas.

Newsletters came to life in an environment already weighed down by public commentary. Born in many ways from the ashes of newsgroups, mass email publication started alike in newsgroups’ freewheeling, anyone-can-say-anything space that was equal parts camaraderie and commotion (and the birthplace of the first spam). The one-to-one nature of early newsletters was freeing, if anything. You knew your audience would get your words, and those alone, in their inbox, while you could still receive feedback in replies that you could read through or filter out as desired.

Yet there was always an obvious way to comment, privately if not publicly: The reply button. Over time that’d prove to be newsletter writer’s greatest best feedback metric, lending encouragement and ideas for next posts in a single message.

“What I need from you is questions. You ask a question. I answer it,” wrote Mike Monteiro in his newsletter, when he started turning that one-way street into an asset. Thus began a series, where he answered questions like “How do we survive being online?,” an email take on the classic letters to the editor.

Replies, after all, are “great for 1:1 conversations. But if you want readers talking to each other — building a real community around your writing — you need something more public,” as Buttondown’s launch of comments on archive pages put it.

More public, though, doesn’t require public-facing comments. Curating the best replies and showcasing them in your newsletter (as long as you have permission, obviously) lets readers feel the shape and size of the community, without requiring continuous moderation to ensure everything stays civil. It’s almost a way to build a moderated, slower take on the original listserv.

Yet there’s a case to be made, in newsletters and blogs alike, that actually letting people mingle is worth its weight in moderation time. In blogs, it requires turning comments back on, perhaps restricting them to people who use their real names or whose accounts you’ve vetted to weed out bad actors. On newsletters, it requires enabling your archives, directing people to reply there, and perhaps requiring a paid subscription to participate.

And then, watch the action unfold.

Let the people speak

“The comments section is where it's happening. It. Is. Everything!,” wrote The Narrative Nest, calling their newsletter “a community, not a stage.” Which echoes Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow fame’s take: “I firmly maintain that a blog without comments enabled is not a blog. It’s more like a church pulpit.” Blogs and newsletters alike, by default, may be one-way streets, but comments can turn them from a bullhorn into a place to bounce around ideas.

“Comments make my thinking better in public,” remarked developer Dwayne Charrington upon reenabling comments on their site. “They surface edge cases, they add links I missed, and they keep me honest.” And they keep things interesting, make writing less of a single-player sport. “Honestly, if I never got any comments, I would likely lose interest in writing,” wrote Mark Starlin on his newsletter’s five-year anniversary. “It’s tempting to write readers’ comments off as a quaint relic of the early internet,” concluded Ben Whitelaw. “But I believe in the comments, and I think they have a future.”

Not just for you, but for your readers, too. “Answering questions on Facebook or Twitter doesn't help any of the people not reading the comments and answers on those particular platforms at the right time,” Tim Leffel argues, taking down the very purpose of moving comments to social media in the first place. “It's far better for users if the comments aren't fleeting and gone, if they're part of the post.” Good for readers and your archives alike.

Comments won’t work out for everyone. Justin Jaffray was hesitant at first, crouching his “I'm trying out enabling comments” announcement with a note: “Behave! I reserve the right to disable them again for any reason including ‘the very idea of someone commenting made me anxious.’” It appears to have gone ok, though; two years later, his newsletter’s archives still have comments enabled. Less so for Alex Hsu, who turned comments off on their blog after a month-long experiment. “I thought enabling comments would motivate me to write more,” wrote Hsu. “In reality, every time I had to deal with comments and carefully word my responses, it ate into the time and energy I could’ve spent writing.”

And that’s fair. Often it requires finding a middle ground that works out for each publication and audience. Blogger Jason Kottke brought comments back to his site in 2023, for example, partly in the wake of Twitter’s implosion, partly in a bid to make his site more of a community. To keep things civil, commenting is open only to members, and remains off on political posts. Even still, he had to take comments offline for a while before re-enabling them in February 2026 while updating the guidelines and sharing examples of good and bad comments. “Really, the vast majority of comments here are great and I’m glad this facet of the site is back,” he wrote, finding the benefits worth the trouble, but the trouble was absolutely part of the tradeoff.

As it was for The Superman ‘86 to ‘99 newsletter. “Imagine our delight (and our embarrassment) when we opened the newsletter archive page for Man of Steel #37 last week and saw there was a comment there from [Man of Steel author] Mr. Jon Bogdanove himself, which had been sitting there unanswered for over a month!,” gushed the authors. All the time spent moderating comments suddenly felt worthwhile.

Sometimes it’s the subtle things that make comments feel like a spontaneous community, like you’re hanging out with a handful of like-minded folks. Take The Sword and the Sandwich, a newsletter about sandwiches, with an especially active comment section that feels like a party centered around obscure, oddball sandwich fillings. “The other running joke about the origin of Marmite is that it's honey made by wasps,” commented one AlphaGamma on a piece about Marmite, which feels fitting enough.

Comments mix validation with pushback, hold you to a higher standard, and let you better know why something frustrated a reader than a bounce or unsubscribe ever could. They’ll annoy you, when you’re blocking spammers or trying to decide if a comment should stay or go. They’ll let you down, when no one comments, then pick you up when they do.

You can have a blog without comments, it’ll just be a bit of a lonelier place. You can have a newsletter without comments and with replies, it just won’t turn into an organic, reader-led community. Comments in both instances let you turn your writing into the glue that brings people together, and keeps them around long after they showed up. Who knows, they might enjoy talking to each other enough that you fade into the background, as your writing morphs into something that takes on a life of its own, and the community together grows into something you could have never imagined?

Maybe not, but it’s impossible to know without pulling the conversations back into your own space.