Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks

I don’t know if this quite qualifies as a trend, but then, trend pieces don’t need real facts, so what the hey. Something I’ve noticed these last months across several major sites, is a move away from the traditional, boring-but-understood approach to comments. While pretty much everyone already agreed that YouTube comments were the worst thing on the Internet, somehow Google managed to make them worse. Not more misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or violent – that’d be hard – but far more nonsensical. In necessitating a Google+ account (which, mea culpa, continues to be totally useless), it shut out many, and in re-threading the conversations based on “relevance” it took away the free-wheeling (often awful, but still) conversational threads of comment sections.

Similar complaints have followed on Gawker’s transition to Kinja, but perhaps the most ridiculous post-comment context has to be Voice Media Group’s new “My Voice Nation” system, which I was alerted to after it pulled in a second-order @ exchange I’d had about one of its stories. Not the tweet itself, but the conversation I’d had about the tweet, with a friend. The “comment section” thus becomes a random mash of unrelated, unconnected words – a documentation of buzz, perhaps, but in no ways a conversation.

And of course: I never signed up for that. I did send that tweet, yes, and I suppose that’s public-ish, but again – not all publicly accessible data is meant to be publicized. I’m guessing most people won’t ever notice, but for me, I’ll just make sure to never send out or comment on a piece of Voice Media Group content unless it’s unavoidable (which is to say: never).

What’s curious about this Death of Comments is that they’re not being eliminated as a feature for principled reasons, or as a straight cost-benefit analysis (i.e., it doesn’t really make sense to have a community manager paid to make the comments not *quite* so execrable). Rather, the transition seems to be away from comments and towards a comment-like substance – words related to the content, written at some point in some medium, presented in some relation to the content. I’m not sure what the long game is on that, but it’s all a little lorem ipsumy for my taste.