A Comeback for Readers' Comments?

In the early days of the internet, reader comment sections quickly earned a reputation for toxic tirades and vitriolic rants. The advent of social media saw commenters move to Facebook and Twitter, making comment section moderation a time-consuming and unnecessary task. But now, more than a decade after large news organizations started shuttering their comment sections, comment sections are making a comeback.

In 2026, it seems there is a perfect storm of events convincing publishers to resurrect their long-dead comments sections. Nieman Lab sums it up nicely: “It might have taken the disappearance of digital advertising dollars, readers getting used to paywalls, social media becoming a cesspit, and the introduction of new powerful AI tools, but publishers are finally coming to realise that the best community has always been right under their noses.”

The 2010s: social kills comments

Back in 2014, Reuters made the decision to shut down its news comment sections, and did so with an announcement:

“Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news, as well as criticism or praise for stories, has moved to social media and online forums. Those communities offer vibrant conversation and, importantly, are self-policed by participants to keep on the fringes those who would abuse the privilege of commenting.” 

They kept comments on the columns and opinion pieces, encouraging discussion between readers and writers, but otherwise they pointed readers to the Reuters Facebook page, where, they claimed, “The best place for this conversation is where it is open to the largest number of participants possible.”

The comments closure snowballs

Reuters was just one domino in a chain reaction of news outlets shuttering their comment sections. Nieman Lab reported that Recode, Mic, The Week, and Reuters all made the change within a few weeks of one another and probably for good reason: “There’s plenty of debate over the issue, as newsrooms struggle with moderation, the value of anonymity among commenters, and, in some cases, the legal issues that arise from what’s said in the comments.” It’s no wonder that news organizations abandoned these troublesome areas of their sites. And, one had to ask, what was the point of these sections to begin with?

The Guardian took an objective look at its own reader comments and found disturbing trends: “New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.” And it wasn’t just women bearing the brunt of the abuse from readers. “The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the ‘top 10’, one was Muslim and one Jewish.”

For Reuters, the change meant doubling down on social media strategy. They hired a new social editor to keep the community engaged with their social media work and introduced Twitter chats around their content. Recode’s Kara Swisher told Nieman Lab, “We get a lot of response, opinion, and commentary there, and also great retweets and likes, especially from well-known people who wouldn’t necessarily comment on one of our sites.” In short, the strategy seemed to be working. So, why are new organizations now choosing to breathe new life into the comment sections they killed?

Commenting makes a comeback for subscribers

Despite what was, by all accounts, the death of comment sections in the 2010s, the debate over the value of comments raged on for years. At the New York Times, they took the debate literally and asked writers to weigh in on the question, “Have comment sections failed?” Opinions ranged from those who wanted to get rid of comments altogether to those who thought anonymity was the problem to those who saw the value in the comments, even if they were troubling, and even impacted how people perceived the reporting—which just about sums up the larger debate.

In 2021, Elizabeth Djinis wrote for The Poynter Institute, that social media may dominate the overall conversation but that comment section still had a purpose: “But if the aim is mission-based, that of a newspaper providing a service to their readers, a way for readers to engage with content that at least gives them the appearance of being heard, then online newspaper comments may still have a long future yet.”

And let’s face it, voluntarily handing over reader engagement to the social media platforms they so often find themselves at war with seemed like accepting defeat. In 2026, Nieman Lab is reporting a reversal of this course: “After years of chasing social media engagement and being burned in the process, publishers have realized that commenting has a tangible value — to the broader public, yes, but also in terms of advertising and subscription revenue.”

Technology to the rescue

The Washington Post has reopened a subscribers-only comment section. Wired has also launched a new “commenting experience” that lets subscribers connect directly with writers and journalists. Over at the Financial Times, automated moderation tools aim “to help readers have smarter discussions under articles and encourage comments from people who don’t typically engage.”

This trend began last year, when Press Gazette announced that logged-in subscribers would be able to comment.

You may be noticing a theme. Publishers are offering the ability to comment as a premium feature for subscribers. In other words, it’s a revenue-driving engagement tactic. But AI is also making this revival possible. AI is able to quickly recognize policy violations, but it still requires a keen editorial eye to make a final decision. Many companies are finding that the boost AI gives moderation teams, combined with limiting comments to people willing to pony up for a subscription, creates a more manageable workload.

The rise of the forum

As some publishers were handing over their engagements to social media platforms, others took a different tactic: they built forums where discussion could happen outside of comment sections. Back in 2022, “German news magazine and website Der Spiegel was getting around 1.7 million comments on its stories per month,” according to Nieman Lab. The sheer volume of comments was too much for a moderation team to handle. Rather than pushing their audience to Facebook, Der Spiegel built a “centralized discussion space for readers to deliberate the day’s biggest issues, launched in December 2023.” It not only simplified moderation and improved the quality of comments, but Der Spiegel has found that “subscribers who do comment tend to spend more time on the site.”

Back in 2016, The Verge took a similar tactic. Helen Havlak, who was the engagement editor at the time, told Nieman Lab, “As we turned off the comments on the posts, we’ve seen more people go into the forums. Forum traffic has jumped about 36 percent. It’s at its highest point by far this year.” So, the question publications need to answer going forward may be more nuanced: How do news organizations foster more productive discussion? 

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