Comment Sections

Short History of Comment Sections

The history of comment sections dates to the late 1990s, with individual news outlets establishing commenting functions underneath news stories. Far from a novel idea, predecessors of comment sections were discussion boards that existed on a variety of digital services. News outlets slowly picked up on providing comment functions, hesitant at first to introduce the possibility for readers to leave their opinions directly and uninhibited in spaces formerly exclusively populated by professional journalists. Letters to the editor had been a common feature of the news well before. But unlike comments, these were editorially selected items, picked from a number of submissions. Comment sections, on the other hand, posed an agential threat to the position of power that journalists hold, as they would allow anyone to air their opinions on anything.

In the early days of comment sections, comments were policed less. Slowly but steadily, the provision of spaces for debate became the norm across news sites as well as other platforms, until around 2013, when some outlets such as Popular Science began to do away with their comment sections altogether. Other news outlets such as the Chicago Sun-Times and National Public Radio followed. News organizations that got rid of their comment sections cited a variety of reasons such as the financial impact of having to invest in teams that would keep comment sections clean, or that large swaths of readers had moved over to comment on news stories on social media platforms where the stories were shared. As the dynamics of digital spaces changed, the majority of online debates was unfolding on social media platforms.

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