On Friday 17 July, the comments section under the “Politics Live” column of The Guardian closed for the last time. The reason given was the cost of moderating the comments which, on a lively day, could number into their thousands. Regular commentators used their final times of having their thoughts published to decry the move, many of them promising to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper, which like much of the traditional print media now relies on online traffic.
The exact number of physical copies of “The Guardian” produced each day is unknown, given that, in common with other publications, the paper has stopped publicising the numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). However the last numbers we have, from July 2021, gave a daily print circulation of 105,134. There are at least one million subscribers to the paper, although again this is five-year-old data, and an estimated 22 million UK readers each month.
Unlike other online publications such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, The Guardian does not have subscriber-only articles, but does encourage registration.The sentiment of the subscribers angry at the withdrawal of the most popular comments section was that their altruism in voluntarily paying for their readership entitled them to be able to voice their personal say on the matters of the day, hence their “can’t say, won’t pay” response.
A right born in ancient Athens
The right to be heard, the right to answer: the ancient Athenians get much of the credit (or blame) for inventing it. At the Ecclesia, the citizen assembly that met on the Pnyx hill, any citizen could exercise isegoria – the right to stand up and have their say on matters of state. Citizens were not, of course, women, slaves,= or resident foreigners. It’s the original comments section, restricted to verified account-holders, only with fewer bots and considerably more taramasalata.
If all of Luther’s 95 theses were actually pinned to a church door at Wittenberg – this could be false news, the moment was not captured for posterity – then their subsequent copy and redistribution (which is undisputed fact) turned what he likely intended to be an invitation to academic debate into a continent-wide row within weeks.
In that sense it’s less “Facebook post” and more “email that got forwarded so many times it started a schism”: the sixteenth-century equivalent of something going viral before its author had any say in the matter. The invention of the printing press was the deus ex machina spreading Luther’s thoughts, and once it started churning out newspapers, the letters pages began; and the only difference between that and “below the line” comments online is that now everyone gets to skip the queue – and the editor – entirely.
When a new medium – television – was invented, we had crowdsourcing dressed up as a quiz show in “Family Fortunes”, where contestants had to guess not the correct answer, but the most popular one – decades before “most upvoted” became a measure of anything. It was less about being right than about being representative, which is as good a description of a comments section as you’ll find.
With the invention of premium rate phone lines, the public actually paid money to have their opinions recorded on “Britain’s Got Talent”, “Big Brother” and “Eurovision”. That is how much people want to have their say, that they’re prepared to pay to tell the world that Charlie who did the ostrich impressions is better than Alan who could fart the National Anthem.
People want to be heard
One of the top ten websites by traffic in the world (and I was surprised and pleased to see that none of that top ten were sites hosting what could be described as “gentlemen’s relish”) is Reddit, the world’s largest internet forum. The forum was the original town square, another “whatever have the Romans given us” contribution, and the internet versions can and do specialise in every topic.
Should you, dear reader, wish to spend hours of your time reading people’s opinions, this is the ultimate rabbit hole you can go down, with “sub-Reddits”, as they are known, dealing with questions one can ask people living in the UK, discussions on UK Politics (now presumably full of disgruntled former subscribers to The Guardian), and you can also talk about the Archers. Enter at your peril, simply because there are so many conversations there to read and potentially join in with.
Bringing the subject slightly nearer to home, the socials of this good organ seem of late to have one particular follower who feels the need to share gnomic comments on our posts that hopefully sounded better in their head than when read out aloud. This is an entirely unintended segue, but Umberto Eco said, of social media: “[it] gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community … but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”
As the former editor of The Guardian CP Scott said: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” The question is – do we have the right to comment? Or are, in fact, the comments with the most “likes” more important to us than the article those comments are underneath?
Certainly, disgruntled commentators on The Guardian felt that a right had been taken away from them – but do we have a right to an answer? I’d love to know your thoughts – the premium rate line number can be found below…
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