&gt;<i>Allowing totally unmoderated comments could lead to the worst aspects of the interent - bullying, harrassment, doxing - as well as open the organisation hosting the comments to legal issues.</i><p>Or it would lead to people learning to finally handle those things.<p>The problem with bullying in real life is the physical threat. You can&#x27;t ignore that guy at the bar or the school bully. On the internet you very much can.<p>&gt;<i>People may enjoy participating in flame wars, but they don&#x27;t bring much value to the reader.</i><p>Those people participating are also readers. As for readers not interested in that, they can skip the comment section (in most websites those are hidden behind a button or in the bottom of the page, after ads, etc).<p>&gt;<i>By far my favourite discussion websites are the ones with agressive moderation policies and a financial barrier to entry. That seems to do wonders to encourage thoughtful and interesting comments.</i><p>I like to talk with people that think in a different way than me, including people from other cultures, political affiliations, etc. So something like that would not work at all, it will be a self-selected echo chamber for the most part.<p>For some things thats OK (e.g. HN is a tech-focused site, so you want to keep discussion to those areas). But for general news stories (something like Medium or CNN), no.