I’m writing today to announce a significant change to the MLive.com website experience: At 6 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, we will permanently close the comment sections on our articles.

We’re not doing this lightly. Comment sections have been a fixture at the end of articles on MLive since the early 2000s, and there was a time that they were a vital part of our efforts to engage you in the work we are doing.

But things have changed quite a bit, and we need to change, as well.

For as active as comment threads may seem, you should know that only a small number of MLive readers participate. For instance, we average 10 million unique users to our site in a month, but only about 5,000 people a month participate in the comments.

Few of them are very active. Across our company nationwide, with 50 million users or more a month, 2,340 commenters account for more than 60 percent of all comments posted.

But comment sections leave an out-sized impression. Conversations routinely go off-topic, the tone can get uncivil or even nasty, and our moderators (and a vendor our company hires) stay busy around the clock policing the conversations, addressing flagged comments and even going so far as to ban some users.

Those resources are better put to use by our staff in creating more news content – something you often tell me you’d value more on our site.

In the meantime, social media has become the default forum for most real-time conversations, both in people’s personal lives and in our branded MLive accounts.

None of this means we don’t value your thoughts or want to cut off interactions with readers. I hope you continue to consume and react to our content on social media, at our main MLive Facebook page or any of the social media accounts for our eight newspapers around Michigan.

You can email our newsrooms by clicking here, and sign up for my weekly letter from the editor here.

You may have noticed that my weekly columns have not allowed readers to make comments. That’s prompted some of you to email me to say that’s hypocritical – that a person advocating freedom of speech should allow the same in reaction to his work.

And I have said: This column is a conversation with readers, about a specific topic or concern. Opening comments would be an invitation for it to go off-track in unpredictable ways, not relevant to the discussion I’m trying to have. And then I’d finish like this:

“This approach seems to be working – we’re having a civil conversation now.”

In a nutshell, that’s a big reason MLive is moving on from comments: So we can slow down, tone it down, and have more meaningful conversations with everyone – not just the loudest and most frequent voices.

I am making an exception to my rule this week, and allowing comments on this column so you can share your thoughts about our decision. I will answer specific questions the best I can, just as I do to those who email me each week. This comment thread, and all others on MLive articles, will shut down permanently Thursday morning.

You also may send your thoughts via email to contact@mlive.com. And I would invite you to help our company shape our engagement opportunities with you by clicking here to take a survey.

And, if you want to know more about the decision and see answers to specific aspects of the shutoff, click on this FAQ.

Thanks for reading, and staying engaged in our journalism. The elimination of comment sections doesn’t end that, it just channels it in a more civil and constructive way. I look forward to hearing from you, and continuing the conversation about our people, our work and our mission.

John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group.