In looking at some of their comments on their Facebook page, it would seem that many are very short and of a non-contributive or productive manner. While there are occasional bits that do contribute to a better community-based conversation, most of the commentary is of a short, shoutbox nature that is just indicative of our baser instincts.

I’ll write a much longer piece about the subtleties of this trend on the internet with some ideas about how to better structure it, but I think the better solution is for ALL comments to be done on an outlet’s own website with extreme moderation. If people want to shout and rant on their own websites, or individually within social media (without the acceleration of algorithms speeding their fringe views into the mainstream) then let them. Newspapers and journalistic outlets have more responsibility.