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The problem that Reuters faces is that its commenters are essentially trying to grab Reuters' carefully built and maintained megaphone and yell their own stuff. There's no way to reconcile the commenter's desires and Reuters desires to not share their megaphone (as such sharing degrades the utility of the megaphone precisely to the extent that the commenters are successful in shouting their own stuff).

There's no "laziness" here, because I'm yet to see even a hint that there is a solution to this problem, despite massive efforts. There's a fundamental conflict of interest. Consequently, commenting on "primary" news sites is uniformly atrocious.

Show me one news site with the reach of Reuters... no, that's hardly fair, show me one news site with a tenth the reach of Reuters that has anything resembling an edifying commentariat.

NYT

show me one news site that has user profiles, a somewhat intelligent voting system and reasonable algorithmic sorting of comments.

Most of them haven't even mastered threaded comments yet.

Threaded commenting can be quite challenging/unintuitive to grasp for non-technical users. The problem isn't that it's difficult to implement, it's an issue of UX. It might be fine on HN or reddit, which skew young and tech-savvy, but it's definitely not OK on Facebook. My parents would be lost if faced with threaded comments.

This is actually one of the design decisions behind discourse.org - its hotly contested for much of the same reasoning. Expert users 'get' threads quickly, and cant even begin to put themselves in the shoes of an internet newbie.

Lazy? No way. They are right. Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

It provided a veneer of user engagement, but how often did reporters or editors participate in comments? How often did reporters change their reporting based on comments? How often did they credit comments in their reporting?

Newspaper comments have been a ghetto for years.

BTW, the same criticisms apply to the comments of most newspaper Facebook pages. Facebook for most publishers is simply a distribution channel--post your stories to your page, hope EdgeRank pushes them into enough user news feeds, and then wait for the traffic to land back on your site. The comments don't matter at all.

The real conversation happens on Facebook when users share the news content--either by re-sharing what Reuters posts, or by sharing it themselves from the website. Then they talk about it with their friends. That's what Reuters is referring to when they say that the best discussion is now in social media. And they are right.

> Comments on news stories never added anything, and publishers only provided comment sections because they thought they "should."

Many news sites do include comment sections on purpose, and from what I heard sometimes even seed them with controversial statements, because they're an excellent way to drive pageviews, and through them, ad money.

Yeah, I used to push for comments on newspaper stories back in the early days of the web because I thought it would expand the good things about online discussion forums to encompass a large segment of the public and yield a higher quality of public debate and thus a better quality of democracy.

I've gotten more pessimistic since.

What is "lazy" is the assumption that Reuters ought to have comments.

Hey, Max. Good to see you here. I disagree. I think removing comments is a perfectly reasonable and even forward-thinking thing to do. I actually wrote a thing on TC a while back that, amazingly, you didn't comment on:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/shouts-and-murmurations/

The truth as I see it is that comments are only there because they're expected, while communities and discussion are no longer limited to the comment section, and in fact better communities and discussion are had nearly everywhere else. I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service.

Apropos of this discussion, the reason I didn't comment on that article was because TechCrunch had switched to LiveFyre, which was barely functional.

I mention that because TechCrunch switched to LiveFyre, ironically, to help promote quality discussion. In fact, it made discussion on TechCrunch worse, as it encouraged anonymous troll comments instead of those under a Facebook identity: http://minimaxir.com/2013/01/its-a-metaphor-maybe/

TechCrunch eventually switched back to Facebook comments. Again, there isn't a perfect solution to comment quality, but there are options.

Oh brother, don't even get me started on that shit. We told their asses not to move to LiveFyre, and we told them not to move to Facebook. I think LiveFyre was Erick's move (may have made sense at the time) and we switched to FB to try it out when it first went live (more happened later). We had outage problems with Disqus before that, which is why we never went back to them (I thought we should). Anyway believe me no one was happy with the comments situation for as long as I was there, and I don't mean that to reflect poorly in any way on anyone I worked with, it was just a weird setup.

> "I don't think "everyone is talking about it on social media anyways" is a terrible excuse, in fact I don't think it's an excuse at all. It's a powerful and real reason not to provide an inferior parallel service."

I think the salient point regarding people having those discussions on social media is that each of us controls our own social media connections. If I share an article on my FB page and someone makes an inane comment, I can delete it. If they make an outrageous comment, I can unfriend or block them (potentially after a warning.) I can get plenty of high-quality perspectives from my friends, but without the down side of the psychos shouting into a megaphone.

The only "advantage" to having comments directly on the main article is that I can potentially see perspectives none of my friends happen to hold -- but I can do that reading the comments on Reuter's FB page too, and then I have a persistent block function I can use on the most obnoxious of the obnoxious.

> The fact that Reuters is removing comments from news stories completely indicates that Reuters is lazy and doesn't want to deal with negative comments at all or find a more practical solution for user interaction.

I think you are right, but let's challenge 'lazy' -- you could instead say that they don't think they will get sufficient benefit -- either to their editorial mission or to their bottom line -- from expending further resources into trying to make comments not suck.

if so, it seems likely they are right. A comments section don't bring customers, doesn't make them look good, and probably won't be missed by most (paying or not) readers. There are other places on the net where discussions happen, more so than 10 years ago, and I'm not sure why you think taking account of that fact is a 'terrible excuse'.

> despite algorithms that can correct for low value comments (e.g. upvoting/downvoting)

I'm not sure that's universally true.

I often see comments lacking substance get highly upvoted largely because people who might have a different opinion would be participating and conversing on a different platform instead of the source website. And so, bias voting can skew what rises to the top.

That is a fair counterpoint, especially on sites with hyperlow-quality content such as BuzzFeed and Yahoo.

There isn't a perfect algorithm to combat the concept of the hive-mind, but there are still simple options (e.g. preventing anonymous comments on articles that may be politically charged) that doesn't excuse Reuters from just giving up.

Doesn't excuse them? They're under obligation to provide you a voice on their Web site now? Your insight is so invaluable that sites are obligated to provide a commentary mechanism? Just look at the comments on this announcement. "State run media." You need someone full time to delete drivel like that, and you're saying they're obligated to do so and have no excuse not to?

I'm tired of this opinion that one deserves a chance to speak in a comments section. While I understand the irony of my saying this here: I have never once in my entire life found value from an Internet comment on some random site. Some discussion communities, a few on Reddit and barely this one, sure, but the comments on CNN? Fox News? Joe's blog? Even your beloved TechCrunch?

If you have something to say, develop an audience using your own resources. Personally, I'm tired of every site on the Internet having a comment form because they are always a cesspool of spam, idiocy, and a waste of pixels. I've come close several times to extending my browser to remove Disqus and other comment systems.

(Also I find it really odd that your claim to fame, as you say, is TechCrunch comments. Is that some kind of badge of honor for you?)

I never said they were obligated to provide a comments section, but I would have strongly preferred if Reuters was more honest about the decision with a explanation of "we no longer have a comments section because we can't devote the manpower to supporting it."

> (Also I find it really odd that your claim to fame, as you say, is TechCrunch comments. Is that some kind of badge of honor for you?)

Yes.

>There isn't a perfect algorithm to combat the concept of the hive-mind, but there are still simple options (e.g. preventing anonymous comments on articles that may be politically charged)

How does one follow from the other? Anonymous people are more likely to share opinions that don't conform to the opinions of the hive-mind in politically charged subjects because there are no repercussions to them doing so. Anonymity is a direct solution to combating hive-minds and upvoting/downvoting is something that further enables hive-mind-like behavior. Why are you saying that preventing anonymity helps with hive-minds? You're conflating two different issues: quality control and hive-minds.

You can have high quality posts that don't challenge anyone's mindsets, this is high quality and high hive-mind. You can have low quality and low hive-mind. And ideally you want high quality and low hive-mind. Anonymity lowers your hive-mind but often lowers your quality. Upvoting/downvoting increases your quality but also increases your hive-mind.

I've heard this called the "mullet" approach -- news up front, inane comments in the rear.

Then it's an excellent opportunity for someone to pay to host a Reuters feed and find the better ways to extract all the notional added value lurking in comments.