I&#x27;ve run some smallish content sites with comment sections. My experience was that in 2007, comments sometimes added interesting context and trolls were relatively easy to ban.<p>By 2014, there were thousands of high schoolers in Asia being paid tiny amounts of money to sit in Internet cafes and create accounts and post spam comments as fast as they could. The only solution was constant, manual moderation, which is very expensive.<p>And for what? When we went back and reviewed our recent comments data, we found that commenters were no more likely to return to the site than anyone else. Engagement metrics like time on site and pages per view were not significantly better for commenters. Commenters talked to each below stories, but persistent connections were rare; mostly it was a one-time conversation between strangers. Essentially, it seemed like the vast majority of comments were just people blowing off steam and then leaving.<p>This coincided with a shift in traffic sources. In 2007 it was largely search engines, other content site referrals, and email newsletters. By 2014 the clear leader was Facebook, with Twitter in the top 5 too.<p>To me it was clear what happened: people now establish one or more &quot;home bases&quot; on community-first sites like social media or aggregators like HN. From there, they jump out to read articles that other members of the community posted. This was the reverse of 2007 and earlier.<p>The challenge therefore today is: how does a site hold onto that social media &quot;snack&quot; traffic. One thing that doesn&#x27;t work: community features. There&#x27;s already plenty of community on Facebook (and Twitter, and HN, and Reddit, etc.), so that&#x27;s not a compelling reason for a visitor to stay.