Well, I was a big evangelist for the idea back int he 1990s, as well as for anonymous posting. With hindsight, this was a big mistake, predicated on an overly rosy view of democracy-as-civic-participation. I thought that people who really wanted to comment (such as myself) were doing so in good faith and wanted ideas to succeed or fail on their merits.

On the one hand, I formed these overly rosy views prior to Eternal September, but on the other it should have occurred to me that the reason trash tabloids sold in large quantities was not that people were tricked into buying them but because a lot of people are in fact awful.

> predicated on an overly rosy view of democracy-as-civic-participation

Ah, the 90s... when people would deliberately leave mail relays open as a service to the community, and people just made stuff for others to use, without worrying too much about hacks or security because the internet is a community and that sort of thing would be bad netiquette...

A simpler time.

There was a time and a place for flamewars, and it was called usenet.

I'd guess the rationale for comments would be implicit before then. e.g. it's not strange to see that there's a chat alongside livestreams on Twitch, or a comment section beneath YouTube videos. There's a natural community of people interested in the content enough to comment. - I'd guess the difference here is that newspapers get significantly more traffic from social media.

I'd also think it comes from a positive vision of technology. The internet as a means of "making the world more connected". Empower people to communicate in ways which weren't possible before. - Turns out this wasn't as positive as expected.

From memory, published arguments have only been against right from the start, because it was so popular that the pro side needed no support.

Comments and social sections were the big in-thing in the latter part of the noughties, if you were trying to make your site modern and hip, it was assumed you'd have comments and share links on everything. I recall a degree of belief that social media was the future and if you didn't integrate with it you'd get left behind, but I think as much it was just a design fad.

Doc Searls, Kevin Kelley, probably Clay Shirkey, various O'Reilly heads, Howard Rheingold, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Declan McCullough, I recall or suspect, were among the boosters.

I'm reading some late-1990s sources (Lawrence Lessig's Code, Andrew Shapiro's Control Revolution) which cover some of this ground. I was there for it myself, though memory is a faulty guide..

Online search is difficult as later writings cloud the results.

Get your readers arguing with each other - makes pageviews go up, which makes ad revenue go up, all without spending more money on those pesky journalists.

Purely a matter of scarcity. Back then people had a real need to know what other people think about things. Then they found out, then they found out more than they should, then they no longer needed to know, then they realized they couldn't stop the torrent so they jumped in to purely vent.