&gt;<i>Not expending resources to actively provide a forum is in no sense &quot;telling people they shouldn&#x27;t be discussing a thing&quot;. That&#x27;s an absurd standard.</i><p>It&#x27;s not the same as commanding them not to discuss in general anywhere, but IT IS shuting them up from discussion in your (the site owner&#x27;s I mean) premises. Essentially the message is &quot;I don&#x27;t like how you are discussing, and I&#x27;m stopping you from discussing here anymore&quot;.<p>The thing is that that&#x27;s (a news site comment section) is the only place that all readers of it can discuss it as a community -- the only place that&#x27;s not disjointed (each own&#x27;s blog, some social news link site, etc) and the place that guarantess more than any other that readers of the same news piece have a chance to see those comments, and that the writer and outlet will see them too (and publicly).<p>&gt;<i>What does that have to do with anything? They&#x27;re not CNN. They&#x27;re external fora. If you&#x27;re happy with those, you shouldn&#x27;t have said anything at all; they exist, they will continue to exist, nobody is talking about shutting them down.</i><p>You missed the point. I didn&#x27;t say Reddit was closing its forum like CNN. I gave it as an example of a place that&#x27;s often considered very bad for its comment threads, to say that even there one can have great discussions.<p>My comment meant: &quot;You think the CNN forums are bad? Hey, people knock down Reddit even more, but you can have great discussions there&quot;.<p>&gt;<i>What&#x27;s your problem then? The whole point of this conversation is CNN and NYT and Wired (eventually) shutting down comment sections, not anybody else. What do you think you&#x27;re defending, exactly?</i><p>I&#x27;m defending NOT closing active comment sections in general, from any site that has them. I&#x27;m defending having comment sections in news sites.<p>Why? Because I think discussion on the news, and directly on their source, is important. In fact it was hailed as a big revolution when this web came out -- that readers have a voice to respond to journalists and not just curated &quot;letters to the editor&quot; and disjointed replies from their own website&#x2F;blog.<p>&gt;<i>With all due respect, you seem to be so sure you already know what other people are going to say, you don&#x27;t bother actually reading what they do say.</i><p>Why does it have to get to name-calling? Did I say anything ad-hominem? .