Reconsidering the Comments Section

When it comes to the social and civic implications of how we spend our precious attention online, we’re big believers that the comments section matters. A lot.

You’re probably thinking: The comments section? Seriously? Aren’t there only crazy people arguing in the comments?!

As social media platforms continue to swallow larger and larger sums of our individual and collective bandwidth, we’d like to make the case that the comments section serves as an important space for civic discourse of all kinds.

This is now especially true due to the ongoing “TikTokification” of social media, as the Chinese platform and its unique functionality continues to reshape the experience of being online in subtle and vast ways.

1. Ordinary voices are now in the comments, thanks in large part to TikTok

The undeniable success of TikTok has increasingly diminished the traditional model of social media, one that prioritized content from friends and family in favor of an addictive, discovery-based algorithm that almost exclusively shows us posts from influencers and complete strangers that it predicts will hold our attention.

It used to be true that receiving hundreds of comments from strangers was only possible through old-school virality or if you were a creator with an established audience. This dynamic has shifted in important ways because the TikTok algorithm (and the other platforms following its lead) shows content to anyone it thinks might be interested in its substance — regardless of whether or not those individuals have ever even heard of the creators. Because the algorithm now entirely decides who sees what content, creators on TikTok can no longer count on their followers consistently seeing their videos in their primary “For You” feeds.

This relatively recent change in how content is amplified and to what audiences has been a boon for the comments sections on individual TikTok posts. Perhaps because most users are not interacting with people they know in real life on the platform (and because they often do so behind an anonymous pseudonym not clearly linked to their real-life identities), they are less inhibited and more likely to engage authentically with other people in the comments. In our experience creating and engaging with content on TikTok in particular, people comment earnestly on the posts of total strangers in a way that feels reminiscent of Reddit and early internet forums.

The result is a dynamic where the comments sections are more fruitful places for having good-faith dialogue than perhaps previously imagined. And while TikTok fosters a more vibrant commenting culture than its competitors, other platforms are increasingly starting to mirror this trend as they try to emulate TikTok’s successful model.

2. Many people look to the comments for important cues about how to evaluate the content they consume online

There is a growing body of evidence showing people use online comments sections to evaluate public opinion and inform their own thinking. As a few examples, academic studies have found that:

• People are inclined to favor online news coverage with positive comments over identical content with negative comments (Taylor & Francis, 2017).

• Disrespectful, uncivil, and otherwise negative comments negatively impact how people regard a piece of online news coverage (Hogrefe, 2017).

• People are more inclined to view content that challenges their pre-existing beliefs as being useful if it’s accompanied by comments that support and echo its argument (Taylor & Francis, 2021)

In other words, comments are an important part of the epistemic experience of being online. For better or worse, we can’t help but use the comments section to help us decide what to think and believe about the things we see on the internet.

Of course, the problem with this phenomenon is that online comments sections are not only vulnerable to gaming by bots and spam attacks, but they too are ruled by algorithms. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have a reported tendency to alter the presentation of the comments each user sees on a given post, elevating the comments predicted to be most relevant. This can result in a dynamic where users’ experience of even the shared comments section is heavily individualized and fragmented based on algorithmically-defined preferences.

Despite this reality, the comments section is a place where many earnest people look to ask questions, engage directly with creators, or have well-intentioned conversations with each other. Nihilists, extremists, and bombthrowers will always be powerful forces in the comments, but writing off the comments section because of them creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where common sense and truth are left out.

Those of us who want to build a better digital world would be remiss to ignore a slice of the modern internet where genuine conversations are taking place.