I think the idea of the participatory web came at a time when people who were participating in the web were a lot kinder and a lot more curios and open about the web in general. I remember being able to scroll through a few forums on which I spent time and being able to engage in conversations with complete strangers with relative ease (late 90s early 00s). At this point, even a somewhat harmless comment on here can result in abuse very quickly or in a swift escalation towards uncivilized behavior. It's still vastly better to a lot of the other arenas of discussion though.

Which says firstly something about the quality of the discourse that can occur within the comments section and the tone of these comments.

Comments have also devolved into a collection of memes and one-liners that don't add anything to the discussion in the best case scenario. At worst, they lead to my previous point. As gregdoesit said in the top comment, a lot of comments have evolved into straight up spam and, similarly, on my blog, I added my contact email address if someone wants to follow up or inquire about anything I post there.

So I think that the participatory internet is dead to some extent. I never got this "comment on a news article" thing either. If a bomb goes off and tragically kills 5 people your "thoughts and prayers + praying-emoji" doesn't add anything. Commenting "fake news" also doesn't add anything. A team losing a game 2-0 or 38-0 also doesn't need a comment section "no, they didn't!".

What I think I'm trying to say is that there is little to be gained, it ads additional maintenance overhead and it can also become toxic very quickly. An older page I had use to provide comments but most of my time was deleting the 10-15 comments posted every day by bots.

Also, the irony of me posting a comment about being anti-comment isn't lost on me.