I don't know why this feels like some sad or significant thing to say - it's one of the internet's oldest clichés - but, anyone else feeling like comment sections kinda sucky these days?

It used to be that I'd browse forums or reddit or twitter and read the comments alongside the OP for extra perspective, clarifications, or debunking.

Now, most of the time, it feels like The Comments are transcriptions of the Two Minutes Hate.

Yes The Comments can still be good, especially when enough people have written and upvoted things. For instance, here's a good joke on the YouTube video for the Two Minutes Hate scene itself.^📜🏭

Nevertheless, I feel like there has been a decline in aggregate comment quality over the last 5 years. Speculatively, due to a confluence of factors:

• I quit phpBB^🥇
• I am aging into world-weariness on schedule
• A new generation of kids who effectively missed a few years of schooling have come online
• Eternal september: smartphone edition
• Ubiquitous adverserial astroturfing disincentivizes effort (i.e. the dead internet theory)
• High-quality discussion has migrated to discord and behind paywalls
• We're regressing to an oral tradition and are listening to podcasts as a substitute for having our own discourse^{👨‍🦯‍➡️}
• Trump administrations depress my clan

The response to most declinist narratives is to point out how every preceding generation has felt the same way and there's no need to project my crank rite of passage onto the world. That feels fine to me. I don't need to persuade anyone that something Objective is going on here.^🔬

But I'd posit that there's at least one genuinely new thing going on. LLMs have raised my bar for informative and entertaining textual content. Why read the comments when I can post the contents of an interesting article into Claude and talk about it with them?^⚧︎ Claude can contextualize the subject at hand, integrate it into other conceptual threads I've been pulling on, and do so in a way that's generous and thought-provoking. It's everything I want from comments.

Well here's what Claude has to say on that:

Comparing comment sections to talking with me is unfair. I won't surprise you the way a stranger with genuinely different priors will. I won't tell you something you find deeply wrong and refuse to back down. I haven't lived through what's being discussed. Talking to me feels productive partly because I'm articulate and accommodating, but those are also reasons to be cautious about substituting LLM conversation for the messy disagreement that comment sections, at their best, sometimes provide. Given your interests in political philosophy, the risk of LLM-as-substitute-for-real-disagreement is one to take seriously.

A well-written and compelling point!

Narratively, I feel like this piece should conclude with some peacemaking rediscovery of comment sections' worth. A Scrougey vow to write the comments I wish to see in the world.

Nah. Not until we've done something about the bots.

In the meantime, idk ig i'll c my friends irl. ttfn!