|We have too much respect for the printed word, too little |awareness of the power words hold over us.
|Often I will find comments below an article (on occasion, alas, below my own articles) that are more intelligent, even better informed, than the article itself.
If an article's comment section is closed, I am much more suspect of the article. If the article has closed comments and doesn't have a corresponding reddit, hacker news, slashdot, etc post, I won't read past the headline. Comments are good at pointing out bias, contradictions and fallacies within an article and have broken the information power monopoly once enjoyed by the media elites.
Comments are also very good at inventing their own fallacies and contradictions. If every comment section was as well thought-out as HN (which still has issues), I would be surprised by closed comments. But that's not how the internet is.
|Comments are also very good at inventing their own fallacies and contradictions.
It doesn't matter how well thought out the comments are. That they exist provides counterpoint and devalues the original article. This is crucial because readers tend to overvalue written word "as gospel".
|If every comment section was as well thought-out as HN (which still has issues), I would be surprised by closed comments.
You are dismissing other opinions before they have even been written by assuming that quality comments only come from particular sources. This is very akin to an argument from authority fallacy. Even if a site was known to have "bad" comments, it doesn't mean ALL articles on that site will have bad comments. Links to articles are posted in a wide variety of other places attracting different readers and commenters.
I'm not dismissing opinions, just saying I understand that one could reasonably want to close a comment section for these reasons. There is more than one stance on the issue. I think the onus is on the reader, not the author, to be critical and form counterarguments. A noncritical reader will ignore good comments or the fallacies in bad comments just as easily as they will in the article itself. Adding comment noise is a very indirect method of encouraging critical thinking in readers.
|Often I will find comments below an article (on occasion, alas, below my own articles) that are more intelligent, even better informed, than the article itself.
If an article's comment section is closed, I am much more suspect of the article. If the article has closed comments and doesn't have a corresponding reddit, hacker news, slashdot, etc post, I won't read past the headline. Comments are good at pointing out bias, contradictions and fallacies within an article and have broken the information power monopoly once enjoyed by the media elites.