As the first person in the world to put comments directly under news stories (japantoday.com), I am appalled by the excuses that sites give to stop their comment sections. For example, the Daily Beast said they were stopping comments because of the trolls, yet there were plenty of good commenters on there. What about them? This trend seems partly driven by an unwillingness to deal with the work of removing actual trolls, which is not actually all that difficult, and the arrogance of some journalists who simply don&#x27;t want their opinions to be questioned. I try my best to avoid those sites now -- they don&#x27;t want you to engage.<p>I&#x27;ve always found that the commenters are the core of the community and they will come back time and time again to discuss the issues and add extra context and meaning. They give sites life. Life is messy, but we deal with it. These sites seem to think they can offload the work to Facebook, but all they are doing is losing their community, the people, and the spark. They should know that Facebook doesn&#x27;t care about their community -- it only cares about Facebook, and will screw them as soon as it can.