&quot;So? Who has the right to tell those people they shouldn&#x27;t be discussing?&quot;<p>Who is?<p>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.<p>&quot;Few real-world stuff works like tech-stuff works.&quot;<p>Nope, that&#x27;s oversimplifying what I said to the point that it&#x27;s simply not what I said. What I said is that there is nothing I know that works at CNN scale and produces anything remotely sensible. It won&#x27;t produce a &quot;community&quot;, it won&#x27;t produce a &quot;conversation&quot;, it won&#x27;t produce &quot;democratic debate&quot;, it won&#x27;t change anybody&#x27;s mind about anything, it&#x27;s just too darned <i>big</i> to produce anything other than a tumult.<p>&quot;Besides, I&#x27;ve had wonderful conversations on Slashdot, and Reddit and other places, even places like 9gag.&quot;<p>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. 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?<p>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. For someone advocating the importance of user comments, that&#x27;s sort of ironic.