One design choice made in this week’s refresh of Project DisCo was to join a number of other sites in closing the comments section. This is a decision not without controversy. In recent years, the site Techdirt has critically chronicled numerous instances of editors removing comment sections.
Some major news publications continue to maintain comment sections in spite of the challenges, but many others have effectively ceded that function to social media. This decision can have business ramifications as well as editorial ones; for sites utilizing ad-supported business models, removing comment sections…
