<i>&gt;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;.
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).</i><p>Yeah, but they don&#x27;t owe anyone that. You&#x27;re positing some duty to provide space for conversation, apparently based on the fact that some sites have provided that space in the past. That&#x27;s essentially an appeal to tradition while ignoring the actual reality of comments on the internet, which is that A) they almost never contribute meaningfully to a site, B) the only way we&#x27;ve found to create meaningful comment sections is through labor-intensive human moderation that most sites don&#x27;t want to pay for (and have no duty to pay for), and C) in place of meaningful discussion, most un- or lightly-moderated comment sections are full of terrible people saying terrible things.<p>I&#x27;m going to repeat something I said downthread, but no one is preventing anyone from having a voice online. They&#x27;re just saying that they don&#x27;t have to publish your voice if they don&#x27;t want to. You&#x27;re arguing that the NYT&#x2F;CNN&#x2F;$FILL_IN_ORG have some moral duty to provide a space for people to have conversations on their site, about their content, without putting any limits on what is said. You&#x27;re not describing it that way, because once you confront the reality of that, it becomes ridiculous. Comments, in that sense, aren&#x27;t &quot;a letter to the editor&quot;, they&#x27;re &quot;I get to tell the editor to publish something and he can&#x27;t decline.&quot; And yeah, having to go read it on your own blog might make the reading experience &quot;disjointed&quot; (whatever that means - clicking a pingback link is about as low-friction as I can imagine in terms of finding pieces responding to the original, especially placed in any kind of historical context), but that&#x27;s your problem, not the person or organization publishing something. They don&#x27;t owe you engagement; if you want to engage, make your own site and build your own audience. You don&#x27;t just get to piggyback on someone else&#x27;s success to broadcast your thoughts because you want to.