Online comments as we know them are dead. Or such, anyway, is the view of Andrew Losowsky – a journalist who, as project lead on the Coral Project, is helping to shape the future of reader interaction.

Losowsky – whose venture is a collaboration between the Washington Post, the New York Times and Mozilla – acknowledges that this view may be a little hyperbolic. But it is one that many publishers share in the current divisive media landscape, where commenting can either be seen as the best way to interact with your audience or an affront to journalism.

“The word ‘comments’ has come to mean toxic space, harassment, overwhelmingly young white male, a lot of abuse, people showing no respect, no compassion and no empathy,” says Losowsky, who believes publishers should think of comments as “contributions” to escape the negative connotations of the word.

John Doran, editor of British music website the Quietus, which recently decided to temporarily turn off commenting on the majority of its articles, compares his experience with comments to battling graffiti. “Imagine for a second you own a shop and the first thing you do every morning at 6.30am is to go outside and scrub a load of deeply offensive and unpleasant graffiti off the front before you can open up.”

The decision to turn comments off was, Doran explains, largely down to the logistics of running an independent music website, and he believes most commenters on the Quietus do benefit the site. But he acknowledges there is a darker side to commenting, one familiar to most people who have ventured beneath the line. “Ideally I’d genuinely like the comments feature left on but I just grew tired of having to be constantly vigilant for occasionally really vicious and libellous homophobia, sexism and racism etc.”

The Quietus now plans to introduce “a different kind of commenting function” this summer. In doing so, it will join the legions of publishers experimenting with new ways of dealing with comments. Potential solutions fall anywhere on the spectrum from charging readers $18 (£13) a month to comment on articles (at Jewish online magazine Tablet), to a 24-hour waiting period on account registration (and therefore commenting) on the games website Polygon.

At the technological forefront of this battle is the Coral Project, which is developing open-source solutions for community involvement on news sites that should allow media companies to spend less time cleaning up negative comments and more time pulling out positive contributions.

The Coral Project’s first product, set for testing this month, is a “listening tool” which will help publishers identify trustworthy commenters based on a series of customisable metrics. “You could say, ‘Show me the people who get the most recommends within the last six months on the sports section, only for comments that are longer than two sentences, on the subject of cricket,’ and then see who comes out,” Losowsky explains.

Publishers can then use this information to identify top comments and involve the best contributors in their work. Readers will also be given better control over the comments they see, with the ability, for example, to remove certain commenters from their stream.

Most of these ideas suggest that comments can, eventually, be tamed. And yet those fighting for the future of commenting are in a race against time, as more publishers turn off onsite comments, encouraging readers to express their views through social media instead. Tech website Re/code, Reuters.com and TheWeek.com all took this path towards the end of 2014 and others such as Vice’s Motherboard followed suit over 2015. Re/code founders Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg explained to readers that as social media has grown “the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used”.

Swisher, also executive editor of Re/code, says the standard of commenting has improved since the move: “It is more lively and has a back and forth that comments do not.” Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse agrees. “The effect of charging people to comment has been exactly what we intended – more robust conversation on Facebook, where most of our readers were already telling us they went for civil interaction, and less toxic sludge on our own site.”

That’s all very well. But sending readers to their social media is not without drawbacks. “There is a risk involved in moving comments to social media,” says Gina Masullo Chen, from the University of Texas at Austin, who is writing a book on the future of commenting. “There is evidence that when your Facebook friends are going to see what you say, then it does affect it, making it more civil, but when you shift it [commenting] all the way to social media there is a loss of control.”

Then there’s the problem of context. “A lot of what you see on the comments is many, many times more contextual than what you see on social,” says New York Times community editor Bassey Etim. “On social people are typically reacting to the headline. In the comments people are reacting to the quote in the fourth paragraph.”

So are online comments really on their last legs in 2016? In their current form, maybe, according to most observers. But there is enough innovation in the field to suggest that online reader contributions are here to stay. Media companies may not be exactly blameless in the rise of toxic commenting, given the sometimes aggressively opinionated pieces they run, but Losowsky believes they will overcome the problems around commenting to the benefit of journalism as a whole.

“If journalism is going to remain important, it has to remain relevant; it has to adapt to and understand better the ways in which journalism can be more collaborative, more community-led,” he concludes. “To do that we need a special way of approaching it and we need special tools. And so I’m incredibly positive about the future, in terms of that way of thinking.”

And if you disagree – well, we’ll see you below the line. Ben Cardew is a freelance writer who contributes to the Quietus