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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

IMDB lost all my respect many years ago when they made clear with their actions that they support fake reviews. When the problem started to grow beyond the occasional vandalism, they still had a very effective discussion section in which users soon began to expose fake reviews. Their response? Of course remove the discussion section! IMDB today has some use for their database only; but they lost any credibility on everything else.

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Comment sections on many websites across the net got scrapped around the same time. Ostensibly because some people use them to say nasty things, but really I think it's about keeping the masses consuming rather than creating. The corporations prefer that creation of content and narratives be restricted to an elite few, while the masses dutifully consume. At the end of the day it's about protecting their bottom line.

> I think it's about keeping the masses consuming rather than creating.

Not really sure I see this. Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc. base their entire business model on the masses creating content. Sure there's a Pareto distribution when it comes to creators vs consumers, but the platforms certainly make money from (and encourage) both.

Right, it seems much more likely that if it isn’t your primary business model, it’s just not worth the hassle?

> I think it's about keeping the masses consuming rather than creating.

No, it’s about moderation cost and preventing discussions that can hurt their brand or partners or customers. Also SEO spam whackamole.

For prominent news sites, controlling the narrative was a big motivation in removing comments.

Many journalists were open about how they didn’t like how comments would question the data or conclusions in their articles. There were too many heckling comments from the peanut gallery so they closed it entirely.

For controlling the narratives comments would be great: rank agreeing comments up to show that many people share the view.

However the reality is that moderating comments is a pain. Too many people writing the most crazy stuff. It doesn't take many "passionate" commentors to ruin a section. One has to simply browse through Facebook comments on any popular topic.

Someone should build a dead simple extension that adds comments back to every website.

twitter.com is essentially that. They're doing okay.

are you saying that writing comments on various websites is equivalent to creating original content?

Yes their ratings used to be quite useful but it’s the clear that people have been gaming the system for quite some time now.

I’m amazed to have just found out that they’re owned by Amazon (from other comments here). I can’t believe I never realised that.

I guess that the increasingly meaningless ratings and reviews should have been a massive clue…

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