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The comment section features online blogs and news sites where publishers invite audiences to comment on posted content. This is a continuation of the old practice of publishing letters to the editor. However, the comment sections can be used for further discussion by the readers.

Various methods have been used for written comments on published works. In Germany in the 1500s, scholars used common practice to print copies of their ideas in public places such as church doors (see, for example, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses). Later, newspapers and magazines began to publish letters to the editor. With the advent of computers, the bulletin board system allowed information to be posted and users could comment on or discuss posts.

The first online site to offer a comment section was Open Diary, which added reader comments shortly after its October 1998 launch. Readers of blogs on the site could publish public or private comments by authors directly on the page. The history of comment sections for news articles began in 1998 with The Rocky Mountain News, as they were one of the first newspapers to add online comments to the same page.

Although comment sections are standard today, newspapers hesitate at first to add them. In the late 2000s, comment sections quickly began to be added to news sites, and between 2007 and 2008, the number of the most common news sites with comment sections increased by 42%. In 2008, 75% of the top 100 newspapers had comment sections. In 2010, the American Journalism Review stated that news sites should not have anonymous comment sections. Following this statement, Reuters, ESPN, The Huffington Post, Popular Science, Sporting News and USA Today either closed the comments or removed them.

The following are examples of some news websites that have disabled comments:

• Vice Media closed its comments section in 2016. Finally, they noted, “we had to ban countless commenters over the years for threatening our writers and subjects, doing private citizens, and engaging in hate speech against pretty much every group imaginable.”
• NPR closed its comment section in 2016. One of the reasons for this was “notoriously known for hosting some of the most pointless and hateful commentaries around”.
• IMDb closed its comment section (forums, not user feedback section) in 2017. At the time of closure, one journalist noted that the comments section on this website was “known for hosting some of the most meaningless and hateful Comments”.

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