Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said “Here, perform everything, to each other, all the time for no other reason.”— Bo Burnham

Against all better judgment and more productive uses of time, people still comment on online news articles. Despite the ubiquity of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, despite the distinct lack of changed minds, despite the patent failure of many commenters to read past the headline: even the most pedestrian piece is appended by an ever-proliferating comments section. Comments sections have caused trolls to materialize, startups to start up, and free speech thinkpiece after free speech thinkpiece to be written.

Some comments sections are a thriving crossroads: the A.V. Club is one notable example, nurturing a pop-culture-crazy community over years—although arguably it’s able to thrive because a preference for Parks and Recreation over 30 Rock isn’t a statement of moral values the way comments under news articles often are. Such close-knit and productive comments sections, then, are the exception. As more and more people task themselves with solving the morasses of spite that constitute most comments sections, it can feel as if any proposed solution is a red herring. Perhaps humans just aren’t built to profitably interact screen-to-screen instead of face-to-face.

Major journalism sites take three approaches to comments sections: moderation, obfuscation, and elimination. The New York Times is a good example of the first. Their comments section is patrolled by staffers for offensive and inflammatory content. The Times allows users to sort by reader recommendations (how many people “recommended” every comment) or “staff picks” (the Times staff selects the comments they find most valuable). Other sites, like Politico, hide their comments sections behind buttons you have to click or articles you have to scroll past, allowing the toxicity to fester safely out of reach; if you’re not looking for it, you won’t find it. Finally, many well-trafficked sites, from Vox to the New Yorker, rid themselves of comments sections altogether. It doesn’t seem like they’re worse off for it.

Like so much of online culture, the act of commenting on an article is a performance, either showing others that you have the correct values (“This is SO important”) or exhibit independent thinking (“This is SO misguided”). Comments usually offer little utility to the author. Responses or complaints are better left to emails or tweets. Any journalist who ventures into the comments section is inevitably broken by the yawning chaos. In face-to-face conversations, we usually moderate such performances by reading and adapting to our interlocutors’ reactions in real time. This is impossible in comments sections.

How do you convince a commenter to perform courteously and productively to what can seem like a faceless void? Compounding the problem, when the void shouts back, the response is most often a mockery of the original input. The half-life of a worthwhile comments section argument is maybe about three replies. After that, conversations typically degrade to straw men, ad hominems, name-calling, or Nazi comparisons.

This raises the question of whether news organizations that hesitate to ditch the comments, and lack the Times’ resources to monitor them, can improve their commenting communities. One of the more compelling simple solutions that I have heard comes from Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Co., a notable type foundry. (Regrettably few people ever think about where fonts come from, or know that a design firm focused on typeface creation has a name as cool as “type foundry.”) Hoefler may not be a journalist, but typeface design is an essential part of most online and printed communication. The infamous Comic Sans MS isn’t the most hated font purely because it’s ugly, but rather because it’s typically incongruous. It’s an adorable font on a children’s birthday party invitation, but converting a Fortune 500 company CEO’s Times New Roman memo to Comic Sans would, without the alteration of a single word, render the memo silly and trivial. The next time you see an advertisement or a movie poster, pay attention to how much the font choice can tell you. Thin, geometric shapes signal the future, like sci-fi movies or startups that mail you your toothpaste. Blocky Roman capitals mean you’re in for a fright. Type design plays a larger role in the subconscious evaluation of communications than most people realize.

Hoefler, in his speech to the 2017 Typographics conference at Cooper Union (yes, conferences for typeface designers and enthusiasts exist) promoted a new project: Inkwell, a family of handwritten-style typefaces. Upon hearing the descriptor “handwritten,” every typographer worth their salt would turn up their nose; it’s generally a futile endeavor to replicate the expressive individualism of handwriting into a cold, mechanical collection of static characters. Hoefler and his team made a valiant effort, though, and the resulting product straddles the line between man and machine quite well. During the presentation, as Hoefler unveiled the typical serif and sans-serif variations along with some more playful artistic experiments, the “crazy uncles” of the Inkwell family, I kept wondering about how such fonts would be used; is there really a market for handwritten fonts, anyway? Hoefler was prepared with an answer: the comments section.

As with fonts, an individual example of handwriting can communicate quite a bit about the author of a message. We get a sense of whether the author is, say, a child, or an alienated teen, or someone in a rush, or a careful neatnik. Hoefler explained that he saw the problem of the comments section as one of subconscious authority. If the comments by a high-school dropout are visually indistinguishable from a Pulitzer-winning reporter, our brain assigns similar levels of authority to the words we read. Hoefler’s solution was one of meritocratic segregation: the chatter of the audience was not to visually mix with the oration of the expert. Communications within the comments could be individualized and humanized.

The more I think about the option, the more I think it deserves a place in our conversation about online spaces. I’m not entirely convinced of its utility. Changing comments to handwritten typefaces may remind others of their shared humanity, but it may come off as hostile all the same. If someone’s comments appear more childlike, their behavior may adapt to match. I do believe it’s worth trying, though. Comments sections certainly can’t get worse.

Lots of tech companies have struggled with their platforms’ underlying similitude, the fact that everyone’s posts look exactly the same on the surface. Facebook’s fake news crisis can be partially attributed to the fact that with a well-written headline and high-quality image, anyone’s blog post can be visually identical to the Times or the Washington Post. Twitter visually signifies certain users with blue checkmarks next to their names, “verifying” that the person behind the account of a notable individual is actually that individual—not some impostor or parody. Twitter recently suspended its verification program because it couldn’t figure out whether or not to verify white supremacists and other purveyors of dangerous ideology. There is indeed a certain utility to keeping up to date with what well-known neo-Nazis are saying and being able to distinguish authentic hate from parody.

The problem, though, was one of design. The blue checkmark sent a visual signal to the reader: This account is worth your attention. This account’s views are, if not pleasant, at least valid. Nine months later, Twitter still hasn’t figured out an alternative, and verifications have largely remained static (some rising celebrities received the check, but there’s no longer an application process open to the public).

The process of identifying certain accounts as “valid” is important because it helps assuage some of the underlying anxiety that pervades so much of American political culture in the present day. This anxiety is largely rooted in the inability to know who, exactly, is behind an online communication. This ambiguity of authorship arouses a fear of a faceless Other with nefarious motives. For example, for Trump supporters, this Other might be a nonwhite Spanish-speaking immigrant coming to take the job of a hardworking American, or the Democrat aiding him in his quest. The average American view on immigration has recently shifted slightly left. The range of acceptable immigration rhetoric on the right, though, has become increasingly extreme, culminating in the president’s use of rhetoric commonly employed by white nationalists, such as that immigrants change the culture of the places they “invade.” The good news is that polling shows that this fear and resentment starts to melt away when the Other has a face. White people in rural areas, which generally have few nonwhite immigrants, tend to have much more favorable views towards the immigrants in their town than those in other towns. The physical presence of a representative of the Other does seem to have a profound effect on a neighbor’s impression of who belongs in her larger tribe. This acceptance is not caused by cogent policy arguments but rather by a consistent reminder that immigrants have the same basic desires as anyone else: security and prosperity.

Though some rural whites may be reluctant to extend the goodwill given to “our immigrants, the good ones” to “the other immigrants, the ones that cause crime,” their acceptance of more members into their community seems to be a promising trend—a trend that is helped not one iota by the existence of the Internet. A profile picture, fluid and ever-changeable, is no substitute for the reliability and predictability of the human form. The Other thrives in this pseudo-anonymity, seemingly more likely to espouse extreme views and less likely to take responsibility for them.

The internet may always act as a separating agent, unable to confer the effects of true contact, and perhaps the comments section won’t ever becoming a uniting common space. However, with just enough human flourish added to the monotony of the web, a visual reminder that there is an individual, flesh-and-blood, behind the text we read, it’s possible we can see each other as more than profile pictures in an uncaring void. Perhaps, then, online comments sections can at least begin to fulfill their potential as a place for discourse, not just discord.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Laymen.