Except for substack. In an interesting twist the comment sections on substack are thoughtful and polite with the authors chiming in -- at least in my experience. Don't know how to explain that compared to most sites. Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
This is something I've seen with countless forums and message boards over the years, i.e. Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.
1) Going mainstream / mass appeal means the lowest common denominator drops, whether that's content or quality of conversation
2) Commercialization incentivizes the wrong things - see Twitter and how its been optimised for "engagement" above all else (not quality of content, or user happiness etc).
Interesting things are happening at Clubhouse but surely they know how this will go. I think successful new platforms that want to maintain their integrity should be looking at paid membership. Substack might be OK because of that.
That's certainly not true for all substacks. Authors choose whether each post is paid-subscriber-only or not, and publicly visible posts can be commented on by unpaid accounts.
Maybe Substack comments are better because they represent a narrow audience (people interested in the output of a particular writer). Generally it is up to the author of the substack to moderate its comments.
Only because they are not moderated properly. Newspapers should simply have a staff member read and approve every post. It really doesn't take that long to read something and hit yes or no.
Nobody said the comments have to be real time.
You're talking about a lot of added cost for little added value. Newspapers aren't exactly swimming in money these days.
Newspapers aren't swimming in money because they don't go all in on online content. Moderating comments, choosing information for their readers, that's their core competence. Writing articles or printing is secondary.
I don't want 50 different accounts and comment sections. I want to take articles I'm interested in and bring them to the town square or pub to talk about. This is that.
A news site running a comments section is sort of like a restaurant deciding they should also sell groceries. Can it work? Maybe - but more likely most people didn't want to pick up groceries at your restaurant, while people looking to steal food know that it's unattended most of the time, so you have a massive shrink rate problem. That doesn't mean groceries are a bad idea, it means it's something people need to specialize into.
Very few news orgs devote the resources needed to curate messages for relevance and filter trolls and flames.
Furthermore, places want to make money on subscribers so potentially have an incentive not to remove postsade by subscribers (no substance behind that theory).
Nytimes is the only news site I see that doesn't have absolute trash for dialogue quality.
Oh, it has plenty of trash comments, they're just expressed in a manner acceptable to the urban elite. All the comments from hoi polloi are filtered.
It's not the same.