Today, it makes much less sense to append to articles a poorly-moderated playground where readers can spout often bilious opinions on an organization's precious web property.

That's why many news organizations, from Popular Science to the Chicago Sun-Times have killed comment sections. And now Reuters becomes the latest and arguably the highest-profile news outlet to jump on the anti-comments bandwagon

http://pando.com/2014/11/07/reuters-kills-comment-sections-on-news-stories-should-you-too/

About time.  Wackos and trolls feed on the reaction of others. Don't give them a soapbox in the mainstream.

>Wackos and trolls

For news sites, I agree with nuking comments --no longer worth the effort to even scroll down.

i'd noticed that on NewScientist... their articles get hundreds of likes and shares but they shut down their comment section.

You can't 'trust' the comment section to give a true representation of what other people are thinking, I've seen a few examples where the pre-moderated posts that get approved are simply the backslapping kind that agree with the article.

>likes and shares

While I personally don't even notice those (like-blindness??) because I don't FB, I think that's a good --maybe even better-- substitute for comments for general-interest articles.  But we here know that for some types of sites, comments can be the best part.  App review sites would be a good example.

Yeah sucks to lose places to drop urls.