Against “Don’t Read the Comments”

We’ve made a habit out of telling people not to read the comments online. But what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web.

This piece is part of my series about how we can move toward humane tech.

Websites didn’t always have comments. I’m old enough to remember when the first sites experimented with different ways of introducing interactivity on their sites. There were web forums (now mostly displaced by Reddit or relegated to minor sites that support niche communities), guest books (sort of a forerunner to your Facebook wall), and then eventually the standard comment box, a simple form at the bottom of the page that asks for your name and your opinion.

The truth is, when many of us were implementing those early comment forms, we did so based on assumptions about web users that were based in the last century. What’s astonishing is that design choices that were out of date when built into commenting tools and blogging software 15 years ago are still repeated as mistakes today on many large, mainstream sites.

The result of continuing to repeat the mistakes we made when building commenting systems a dozen years ago is that nearly every popular large-scale app or social network or news site has some significant issues with widespread abuse of users, particularly marginalized users.

And those of us who see ourselves as savvy insiders in media or tech joke about it knowingly, saying, “Don’t read the comments.”