https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/new-wordpress-policy-allows-it-to-shut-down-blogs-of-sandy-hook-deniers/
Comments on that TechCrunch article are a good reminder of why so many websites no longer have comments enabled.
The tiny sidebar section for comments makes the never-ending screeds look that much less visually appealing.
Hard to understand the incentive to make a comment that long that almost nobody will ever read. For their own sake, hopefully they are doing Control-C / Control-V with those comments!
>comments
First, there was banner-blindness. Now, there's comment-blindness. Unless it's a tech-oriented article, I just don't go into comment threads --George Carlin's quip about the "average person" is quickly brought painfully to mind.
But on most sites, Techcrunch, for example, my browser doesn't even bother to render them. Hat-tip Privacy Badger/uBlock/ScriptSafe.
The comment spam bots hammer my blog every day. Akismet keeps them at bay. I've only had two people use the comment form, and in both cases I'm glad they did.
Wordpress did the right thing writing a very narrow policy rather than using a meat ax approach.