The Best Comment Sections on the Internet
The best comment sections on the internet are rationalist or rationalist-adjacent communities. Even though places like LessWrong are often insular, are internal jargon heavy, and sometimes devolve into intense naval-gazing around their pet topics like alignment, they have some of the best norms around for promoting productive and polite disagreements. There are some other forums like Hacker News that also seem to have decent community norms for comments, but still have some degeneration of comment quality.
The communities with the highest comment quality that I’ve run into are LessWrong, the EA forum, Scott Alexander’s blog (currently Astral Codex Ten), and a few other rationalist-adjacent blogs like Bentham’s Bulldog.
The qualities that seem to lead to a good blog comment section are first and foremost the kind of audience that a writer attracts. Partisan hacks (people who will almost without fail unthinkingly take the position of a tribe), tend to engender an audience of partisan hacks. An audience of partisan hacks–unsurprisingly–tend to be unwilling to engage with ideas they disagree with in a polite and intellectual rigorous way. A non-partisan blogger1 1 Perhaps other types of content would also work, but I just haven’t personally seen examples of intellectually rigorous and high quality content delivered at regular intervals in other formats besides blogs. seems necessary but not sufficient for a good comment section. What else then is required?
You also seem to need strong community norms when you start off that are enforced. To have any norms you first need a community, people who regularly read and comment on your content, rather than drive-by viewers2 2 This might be another reason I’ve only seen good comment sections on blogs. Most viewership is driven by regular readers rather than algorithm virality like YouTube or Twitter. Somehow that community needs to start off with strong norms, I’m not sure how much of that comes from the writer/moderator themselves or the type of people their writing tends to attract.
The final necessary piece is steady rather than spiky growth in audience size. You have to avoid the “Eternal September” problem where a community with strong and healthy norms sees such a huge influx of new participants in a short amount of time that there isn’t time for new participants to be taught and conform with the norms and begin enforcing them on others. The proportion of the community who knows and enforces the norms quickly becomes the minority and the norms break down.
It’s still an open question for me as to why I’ve only seen these types of comment sections are so over-represented in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent communities. Not to say of course that these communities are perfect. There are issues that rationalist communities can be partisan on. A recent example I saw is the very different reception of the same post criticizing the rationalist BDFL Eliezer Yudkowsky on the rationalist-adjacent EA forum and the highly rationalist LessWrong site. The comments on the EA forum are much higher quality and even include a philosophy professor adding additional insights to the post as well as a few solid corrections. The LessWrong comments on the other hand devolve into debating the philosophical arguments without acknowledging that no matter what side of the debate you take, Yudkowsky flat out doesn’t even understand the debate to begin with.
Overall though, these communities have great norms and are some of the best comment sections I’ve seen on the internet.