Comments Were a Mistake

George Carlin said “People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people.”

I enjoy what people have to say. I hate hearing what bots have to say. And the problem on many platforms is that it’s near impossible to tell the difference.

I used to have comments enabled on this site but since the rise of Twitter, useful comments from actual people declined quickly and useless comments from spammers trying to create backlinks found their place.

Twitter and Facebook and Instagram were once a linear feed of people you knew. They were replaced with algorithms that threw unknown people and advertisers randomly into your face.

Connecting with real people, creating and expanding a community, was replaced by engagement-seeking sycophants and mass manipulation. The more divisive one can be, the more engagement they can farm. The more engagement they can farm, the more “valuable” they are.

One of the more benign but frustrating trends I’ve seen is asking “what does it mean” on content, in spurring others to lift up their comment, perhaps driving people to their profile, and increasing engagement in their other content. A video of a bear eating a fruit: “What fruit is the animal eating?” “What kind of animal is that?” They ask questions that are extremely obvious and are often already answered in the caption of the video.

As Simon Willison reports, AI is ramping up the increasing uselessness of internet content by pretending to be real people with real anecdotes. “The idea that my opinion on an issue could have been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a research bot is abhorrent to me.”

I’d add that the idea of my opinion on an issue could be influenced by a friend who has been influenced by a fake personal anecdote invented by a bot is abhorrent to me and is one of the reasons I’m extremely frustrated by the swaths of disinformation perpetrated by bots, foreign and domestic governments, AI, and disingenuous actors.

It is for this reason that I feel like comment sections were a mistake. Newspapers shouldn’t have them. News media shouldn’t be quoting random tweets. Blogs should be more restrictive in who can comment. Social media platforms shouldn’t let content from people you haven’t explicitly subscribed to become part of your feed—and that includes retweets/reposts.

In my attempts to maintain some sanity, I consciously have to tell myself how the verity of comment sections should be ignored and never engaged with. I turn off reposts on any platform that has them. I use platforms that have a linear feed with no injected content (currently, Mastodon and Bluesky). I haven’t accepted comments on my site in years and will avoid comment sections on other people’s sites.

Individual people are wonderful. I’m just a little more antsy when it comes to anything that is indiscernible from manufactured content.