The Mysterious Disappearance of the Comment Thread

You probably noticed it before I did--the vanishing of comment threads from about the web. News sites, Youtube videos--places where you once took it for granted that there would have been a space for public feedback since foreclosing the possibility.

This seems to have happened quietly for the most part, the press not talking about it very much, and such discussion as I can find generally appearing not in the major mainstream media outlets but smaller, more specialized web sites (Techdirt, for instance, having long had its eye on the matter).

The standard explanation is that this was a response to the reality that such threads so often contained more spam, trolling and abuse than real dialogue about the item at hand. However, another more critical view is that this was a matter of heading off reaction to the extreme views and content the media promulgates, which the media know full well would offend many, but "shove down their throat" anyway. (Some of those espousing this view, for example, hold that the reason for, for example, turning off comments in response to "woke" content is that they do not want to deal with the inevitable criticism.)

I suspect that both are right, not least because each in its way confirms the other (the woke content, of course, bringing on a reaction not always civil). Yet it also seems to me that while the media, strictly speaking, has no obligation to make a space available for comment its withdrawing that space after users had become accustomed to the opportunity to "talk back" to the press has a whiff of repression about it--the more in as the press organ is recognizably powerful and influential, and in as this has at least in part because of the political content of that comment. I can hardly deny that spammers and trolls befouled many a scene--but it is not only the spammers and trolls who get shut out this way, with all that implies for even the pretense of there being a conversation in this society.