It's not just local news. Even the Washington Post's comments section is awful. Not just in terms of the content, but also the UI. For example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/coronavirus...

Who wants to scroll through 1k comments in a narrow, awkwardly-paginated column? They also allow posts from anyone with an email account (mitigated somewhat by the paywall on most articles) which results in a lot of high-emotion, low-information spam. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal limits comments only to people with a subscription. Perhaps as a result, the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

Maybe (I've never tried to look at WaPo comments). I did find that the WSJ comments are much, much worse than the FT comments (angrier, less interesting).

I wonder if this is driven by the different susbscription prices, or just the different audience.

> the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

How many WSJ comments sections have you actually read?

That's what I'm saying, the Post's comments are even worse.

The gold standard for comments is Tim Dowling's articles in The Guardian.

I don't dare look at the WP now.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/13/tim-dow...

yeah I'm actually quite happy with the comments on the Guardian. They don't have them on a lot of articles but when they do they always have their Guardian Picks, meaning high quality comments that are highlighted. I don't know why the general comment section there is good but one point is definitely moderation. They even delete postings (spam or flame wars).

Indeed, the Philadelphia Inquirer has not, for at least 10 years.

* https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/25/inquirer-daily-new...

* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/Our_Comments_Are_Changi...

* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20100707_Le...

everybody knows the real hot goss is in the NBC10 comments section

> I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.

In my mind, the answer is quite easy: increasing the amount of page loads increases the amount of ads people see. If you deliver emails along the lines of "someone replied to your comment", people are gonna click on them and you're going to serve another set of ads.

Moderation requires effort and reduces the amount of page loads, therefore most websites that use comments don't want to do that.

From the article:

> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.

I don't think removing comments will affect page views by much.

I think that sometimes a comment section can add value (like high voted comments on HN), but for a newspaper which has a very broad and undiscriminate audience, they need a better system.

I think I saw one system where you couldn't comment directly, but you could post a reaction. It would need to be approved before being visible to others first. I think such a system, while pretty labor intensive, would be preferable.

A similar thing happened a few years ago after my friend died in a car crash: when I saw the unbelievable comments, I wrote to the editors begging them to delete all comments and disable any more. I feared my friend’s husband would stumble upon them. Why is a comment section even necessary on such an article?

Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.