We're Still Open to Comments, But Use IRC, Not Social Control Media
THE trolling and overt abuse (not merely a disagreement) in social control media by far exceeds what we've experienced in both internal and external IRC networks (hosted locally or outsourced to Freenode back when it was functional and decent). There is a good reason for that. We covered that many times before. 'Hit and run' trolling takes more effort in particular contexts. For what it's worth, blog comments can also facilitate 'hit and runners'...
"Closing comments was a severe blow against mainstream media and sent even more traffic over to social control media which in turn further reduced visits to mainstream media sites," an associate recalled last week. With forum-like comments, like in Phoronix (not that we endorse that site), things can become more 1) community-like 2) suitable for repeat visits and 3) on-topic.
When people comment on articles in social control media outside the control of knowledgeable ('responsible') people the discussion turns to junk or may drift astray into the realms of disinformation and thus time-wasting at best.
The bottom line is, in our experience, mainstream media (MSM) is dooming itself by embracing things like X/Twitter and Facebook. Nobody stands to benefit except Zuckerberg and Musk. MSM does not boost traffic to sites like it used to 20 years ago. Even national news sites have been mostly outsourced to some social control media account/s. So their own sites get neglected; it's just like some blog with moderate traffic levels, maybe 1,000 reads per article (unless something very popular, exclusive or outrageous goes 'viral').
In the early years of this site we got almost 40,000 comments, but we turned to IRC and we're better off for it. We never outsourced to sites like Twitter (now "X", a site for crackpots), so whatever dumpster fire they turn into, this will barely affect us. █