Justin Tadlock discussing the relevancy of comments:

Commenting on and discussing ideas in an open forum can change hearts and minds. It can lead to discoveries and create life-long friendships — I still routinely chat with people I met through blogs and their comments from nearly two decades ago.

I love comments, but then I don’t really have much of a community outside of friends I’ve met online. Outside a few spambots I have never received anything other than nice feedback or healthy debate. But…

Comments on popular platforms such as YouTube can be an absolute dumpster fire. As someone who publishes videos for my day job I am constantly removing comments on videos that showcase the worst that humanity has to offer.

Ryan McCue, a core contributor to WordPress, said that comments should be a plugin.

I strongly agree with this, the default option for anything on a blog, web, video whatever should be comments off, and you turn them off by default.

Openness when being able to choose a comment provider should also be the de facto stance from all platforms. If I want to move hosts or anything else, I want to take my comments with me.

McCue’s response was to a tweet by Brian Krogsgard, the Post Status creator and editor. “WordPress should have one singular button that says: Turn off all comments and comment displays. This is so hilariously complicated, it’s absurd.”

Comments on WordPress are so far behind where they should be it’s a joke at this point. Dating the way they look and feel is impossible without editing core WordPress files and good luck in understanding what options do what. I spent a good few hours configuring Webmentions as comments and allowing them to be displayed, when it would have been a 2-minute job.

I, the publisher should own the comments the same as I own my content, so making them a plugin would be the perfect move. Don’t even get me started on the non movement of implementing Webmention after 5 years.

Comments should be part and parcel of your life online. However, all roads point to something better. You will get fools, but you’ll get them on social media anyway, but better tool are needed to breathe life back into something so important to the web.