For an online journalist, it feels like an uphill battle when trying to create content that will both draw readers and inspire conversation. So it was with great confusion I discovered the click-drawing power of the comment section was not only dying down, but being removed from many of my favorite websites.

How can such an important focal point of online journalism be removed so easy? The answer may surprise you as much as it did me.

Failed experiment

This is how it was supposed to work: Online journalist writes article, article gets published, article initiates conversation, which is facilitated by comment section. The comment section then provides a forum for opinionated individuals to debate article's issue, thus keeping the article alive long after it has run its course.

Of course, as any of us can attest, this is not how comment sections work.

You may have noticed comment sections are going the way of the pager, the landline phone and the wristwatch — just one more technology that has worn out its welcome. Recently, Vice's tech and science news site Motherboard was one of the first major names to cut out its comment section. Reddit's Upvoted was another.

This is nothing new, as Wired chronicled last month, websites have been dropping their comment sections since 2012.

One problem is too many people are commenting. With many people syncing their Facebook accounts to online news sites, people can easily sign up, log on and reply in a matter of moments. The growth of online audiences, and those capable and willing to comment, has expanded beyond the point where it's viable for news sites to properly moderate.

Secondly, as Wired's Klint Finley said on the subject, "most vibrant conversations about a particular article or topic are happening on sites like Facebook and Twitter. So many media companies are giving up on comments, at least for now. So far this year, Bloomberg, The Verge, The Daily Beast and now Motherboard have all dropped their comments feature."

Haven for trolls

Initially, the comment section was meant to be a "logical, democratic outgrowth of the old letter to the editor," noted Jef Rouner with the Houston Press. If someone had an opinion to share with the newspaper, he or she would send a letter to the publication and the "editor would decide if it was germane enough to publish it. What [the process] lacked in accessibility it made up for in quality control. In practice, this is rarely what a comment section actually is."

This is perhaps the understatement of the century.

Find any active comment section, from any online media outlet, and you will encounter what can possibly be the unfiltered, unfettered, dark side of human impulse. Go to YouTube or any blog with a decent amount of traffic and you'll find the comment section does little more than provide "Internet trolls" a place to vent their ill-informed, self-congratulatory nonsense in never-ending spools.

The root problem with comment sections, Rouner reasoned, is that a comment is rarely a "communication between the commenter and the creator, and it's almost never constructive criticism. It's performance. It's a rook circle, a parliament of birds pecking at one in the center. It's so normalized that 'don’t read the comments' has become the online equivalent of 'don't eat things you find on the ground.'"

What's worse is comment sections don't even seem to even work.

According to a research study performed on its own audience, Slate found most of its readers don't comment on the articles read. In fact, there's little overlap between who reads Slate's articles and who comments on them.

"In September, for example, 99 percent of all Slate readers did not comment on any Slate article they read. Most readers just aren't commenters," said Slate's Jeff Friedrich. "As a result, most conversations below Slate articles are small.

"Slate has published more than 12,000 pieces since the beginning of 2014. Only 12 percent of those pieces attracted participation from more than 100 individual commenters. In comparison, the average Slate article attracts many thousands of readers — or at least clickers."

What's next?

Comment sections are hard to maintain and even harder to moderate. If you control your own blog, the task of sifting through the comments to find the relevant, inoffensive ones can be daunting. This is especially true when the majority of comments tend to be spam and/or marketing related.

According to Michael Andor Brodeur of the Boston Globe, "Every publication I've ever worked for has suffered and had repeated long conversations at longer tables concerning what exactly was to be done about comments: When to allow them? Where to put them? How to control them? The only question routinely left behind was why to have them at all."

It is no surprise that in today's ultra-aware climate there are few, if any, online outlets comfortable with providing forums for socially and culturally insensitive opinions. Best-case scenario, you have comments that expose or celebrate intolerance; worst case, your website houses all-out racists and hate-mongers who spew vitriol in never-ending spools.

Websites are brainstorming ways of addressing the problem of comment section, and there are a few interesting ideas. On sites like Quartz, Genius and Medium, rather than actual comments, readers' contributions are written as annotations within the text. Other sites are developing moderated Q&A's between audience and author.

"Some may smart at the news that these once-open avenues of participation are now being blocked off, arguing that comment sections afforded an uncomfortable but crucial view of the clash and clamor between opposing viewpoints in the wild," Brodeur said.

"These people probably never read comments."