@Christina Warren As someone who is an editor at a fairly large media site, I can say that we haven’t chosen to use LiveFyre (and before that our own custom comment engine, and before that Disqus and before that WordPress comments — and this is just in the 4 years I’ve been there) to deep-six comments...Yeah ... I tried to get a little too clever there for my own good.

It was meant as more of a reflection on Disqus ... that media who don't really have a good role for comments within their organization & website, yet don't want to outright 'stiff' popular interest in them, in some cases have appeared to me to be 'shoving' comments off onto Disqus. Many media operators eschew comments out-of-hand, of course ... but the IT Dept techies at many places plug for comments, even though management may not be into it.

I've certainly seen examples where the comment-action cools right off, and becomes either a small lounge-lizard hangout, or the scene of casual drive-by pot-shots, when such News sites go to 3rd party comments. Maybe I picked up on Disqus-cases, because it is the more-prevalent solution.

But my real error here was scratching the paint on the business-Media vehicle. As Media industry relocate to the Web, they & their activity-pattern appear to be an ally of outcomes that I & I think We, prefer to see. Media-biz, especially in the middle-tiers, favors the kind of Internet-model that preserves values that make the Net exciting to me/us.

I'm talking here about a business-trend that I imagine to have been at least begun as journalism refugees from the devolution of the Dead Tree Press. Thousands of formerly secure publishing entities, who are not big or prominent enough to be picked up by the Koch Bros and Rupert Murdoch, or by George Soros and Warren Buffet, and are 'on their own'.

A lot of "solid" News professionals and journalism journey-folk have had to seriously suck it up, look squarely at their eroded options, and commit to an online model, or get out of the business altogether. This is "it" for these folks, and they have to really lean into it.

We saw a similar process in recent decades, with Local Television. These entities & their people ended up in a bit of a limbo, and had to go with a creative approach, 'on their own'. That they were in fact ultimately successful, is underscored by the news that Tribune is now buying up 19 of them for $2.7 billion.

Those local TV-station businesses were a very significant bulwark, fending off larger trends in the broadcasting industry that were adverse to my cultural preferences. "Solid" Media now trying to do something similar on the Web, promise to likewise serve to slow & counter unattractive trends on the Internet.