I really doubt anyone cares except the 50 nut jobs for whom it’s their whole life to yell on news comment sections

Local newspapers were the inspiration for comments sections, specifically the “letters to the editor” section.

Sure, but that is a moderated communication channel. They pick and choose what to publish and, unlike most comment sections, unmoderated content is not visible to your audience. The opaqueness of the moderation process in a world without instant mass communication (i.e. the internet) would also likely have made it unlikely for your readers (users) did not have an expectation for their messages to be quickly reviewed or published.

The other big advantage is that the only participants in channel are the newspaper and the submitter; no interaction between third parties on your platform means no flame wars or the like.

I'd love to see an in-print flame war.

If you haven't seen it, this article [1] on the London Review of Books about Glenn Gould is a good start. It's a really long essay on why Glenn Gould is amazing while Alfred Brendel doesn't get it, only for Brendel to show up in the "comments". These comments are actually letters to the editor, so it's the world's most educated and polite internet fight.

And if you can tolerate the meme format, [2] is my favorite academic fight of all times.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/nicholas-spice/how-t...

[2] https://twitter.com/phonologist/status/982023915319906304

Those two guys from Twitter, are here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhrD5SVo3OU

Ah, a time honored tradition: http://resident-theology.blogspot.com/2009/10/augustine-and-...

Sure, but letters to the editor required the paper to read them and choose which ones were worth printing.

Comments on most news sites are typically just assholes making every story about whatever they're obsessed with.

Letters to the editor are still an active thing.

Jinx

That curation is also a problem. In an era where every news outlet is biased, and most of the major ones are lurching ideological leftward, and journalists bring their personal politics to work, the lack of equal and uninhibited reach for opposing viewpoints is a problem.

Yes, but letters to the editor were picked by the editors for their ideas and for their writing. It was a high bar, often higher than the newspaper itself. So I used to enjoy reading them because of this.