I’ve been tracking reader comments sections across Australian news sites for the past two years, and the trend is unmistakable: they’re being shut down, quietly and without much fanfare.

Last month, two more major metro newspapers turned off comments on most articles. They join a growing list of publishers who’ve decided that after 20+ years of trying to make online comments work, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

And here’s the surprising part: most readers don’t seem to care.

The Numbers Behind the Shutdown

I analyzed 15 Australian news sites that published comments data. Between 2022 and 2026:

• Average comments per article dropped from 47 to 12
• Percentage of articles receiving any comments fell from 65% to 31%
• Active commenters (posting more than once per month) declined by 68%

Comments sections didn’t die suddenly. They slowly faded as readers migrated to social media, as trolling became exhausting to moderate, and as publishers realized they were spending significant resources on something almost nobody used.

One editor told me their newsroom employed 1.5 full-time-equivalent staff just on comment moderation. That’s roughly $120,000 per year. In return, they got an average of 8 comments per article, most from the same 50 or so regular commenters.

The math doesn’t work.

Why Comments Died

There’s a nostalgic narrative about comments sections as the digital version of community discourse, where readers could engage directly with journalists and debate ideas with fellow citizens.

That’s mostly mythology. Anyone who actually moderated comments sections knows the reality was very different.

The vast majority of comments were low-effort reactions: “Great article!” or “This is terrible journalism!” One-liners that added nothing to the conversation.

A small but vocal minority used comments sections to grind ideological axes, push conspiracy theories, or just be abusive to journalists, other commenters, or the subjects of articles.

And the people who might have contributed thoughtful, constructive commentary? Many stopped bothering because the environment became so toxic. Nobody wants to post a nuanced comment only to be attacked by anonymous trolls with time to spare.

Social media didn’t kill comments sections. Comments sections killed themselves by failing to maintain environments where worthwhile conversation could happen.

What Publishers Tried

To be fair, publishers did try to fix this. They experimented with:

• Real name policies (didn’t work, people just used fake names)
• Facebook login requirements (reduced volume but didn’t improve quality)
• AI moderation tools (caught obvious abuse but missed subtle toxicity)
• Community moderators and upvoting systems (added complexity, limited impact)
• Paid subscription requirements (killed participation entirely)

Some publications tried “Letters to the Editor” style curation, where they selected and published the best comments as standalone content. That sort of worked but required significant editorial effort.

Nothing really solved the fundamental problem: getting thousands of strangers to have productive conversations online is hard, and most readers weren’t interested in trying.

Where the Conversation Went

The conversation didn’t disappear. It just moved.

Social media became the de facto comments section for news. Publishers share articles on Facebook, X, Threads, and LinkedIn. Readers comment there instead of on the news site itself.

From a publisher perspective, this is mostly better. They don’t have to moderate. They get the engagement metrics and social signal boost. And problematic comments are technically “not on our site,” providing some liability and reputational distance.

The downside? Publishers have no control over that conversation. They can’t moderate. They can’t shape the discourse. And they’re building community on someone else’s platform.

But apparently that trade-off is acceptable because publishers keep investing in social media distribution while shutting down on-site comments.

What We Lost

I’m not entirely cynical about this. Something genuine was lost when comments sections died.

There was occasional magic in comments: a subject matter expert adding crucial context, a person directly affected by a story sharing their experience, a reader catching a factual error before it spread.

These moments were rare, but they were valuable. They made journalism better and more complete.

Comments sections also provided journalists with direct feedback about what resonated with readers, what confused them, what they wanted more of. That loop is harder to close when conversation happens on scattered social media platforms.

And there’s something about the decline of on-site comments that feels like publishers giving up on the idea of building communities around journalism. They’re content distributors now, not community hubs.

Maybe that’s realistic. Maybe trying to be community hubs was always a pipe dream. But I think we’re poorer for giving up on it.

What Journalists Think

I’ve talked to dozens of journalists about this over the past year. The responses break into three camps:

Camp 1: “Good riddance.” These are journalists who bore the brunt of abusive comments. They don’t miss the personal attacks, the conspiracy theories, or the bad-faith arguments. Comments sections made their jobs harder and their mental health worse.

Camp 2: “I miss the good ones.” These journalists remember the occasional insightful comment that added genuine value. They acknowledge the problems but wish there’d been a way to preserve the upside while eliminating the toxicity.

Camp 3: “I never read them anyway.” Larger group than you’d expect. Many journalists stopped reading comments years ago because it was just too depressing.

Nobody I spoke with argued for bringing comments back in their old form. The experiment ran its course, and the consensus is it failed.

The Outliers Still Trying

A few publications are bucking the trend. They’re still publishing comments, trying to make them work.

The common thread among successful holdouts: they’re niche publications with engaged, relatively homogeneous audiences. Technical communities, professional associations, specialized trade publications.

When you have a focused audience with shared professional norms and genuine expertise, comments can still add value. One tech publication editor told me: “Our comments are often better than the articles. We’d never shut them down.”

But that model doesn’t scale to mass-market news. General-audience publications dealing with contentious topics (politics, crime, social issues) face fundamentally different moderation challenges.

What Comes Next

Some publishers are experimenting with new engagement models:

• Curated reader panels where selected readers provide regular feedback
• Subscriber-only discussion forums with stricter moderation and smaller groups
• Newsletter comment sections (much smaller, more manageable)
• Virtual events where journalists and readers interact in real-time

These approaches trade volume for quality. Instead of thousands of comments from anyone, you get dozens of comments from engaged subscribers who care enough to jump through hoops.

Whether that’s better depends on your goals. If you want community engagement and loyalty, probably yes. If you want mass reach and viral distribution, probably not.

My Take

I think the death of comments sections reflects a broader reality about online conversation: scale and quality are inversely correlated.

Small, moderated communities can have productive discussions online. Large, open platforms quickly devolve into chaos.

News publishers tried to have both: large audiences and quality conversation. It didn’t work. Turns out you have to choose.

Most have chosen scale over community. They’d rather have 100,000 readers sharing articles on social media than 500 regular commenters having civil discussions on their own site.

I get it. The economics push that direction. But I do wonder what we’re giving up by abandoning the idea that news organizations should host community discourse, not just distribute content into the social media void.

Maybe that’s someone else’s job now. Or maybe it’s nobody’s job, and we just accept that online discourse will be fragmented, unmoderated, and occasionally toxic.

Either way, the era of news site comments sections is ending. And honestly? Based on what most of them became, it’s hard to argue we’re worse off.

I just wish we’d figured out how to make them work. The original promise—readers and journalists engaging directly in substantive conversation—was worth pursuing. We just never got there.