On the one hand, the immediate feel is, "Hey, great way to suppress discussion." Which is kind of silly, because there's eleventy-dozen ways to discuss any PopSci article without ethically requiring them to maintain a comments section.
Further, I do agree, from a personal perspective, that contentious comments can stain overall perception of an article (even if I realize those contentious comments are so much bushwa). If nothing else, they make it all unpleasant and lead one to simply page away.
Popular Science says comments are ‘bad for science,’ shuts them down
Some comment sections are enlightening, some are depressing, and many — according to Popular Science — are actively hurting the scientific community. In a post today, the online wing of the…
Nobody ever complained when Popular Science (the magazine) didn't print every letter they received. No magazine is compelled to have a letters page; why should their websites be? It's their site; we are welcome to our opinions but that is all they are. Those who don't like the decision are free to get science stories elsewhere.
If only YouTube would take the same approach.
I instinctively skip the comments section of just about every news site and online magazine, just because it's so often a useless cesspool. Wouldn't be at all sad to see them go away.
Some ares are cess pits of great immensity (YouTube comes to mind; newspaper comment areas likewise). But there's often nuggets of gold in those middens, and the opportunity to find those sometimes sends me searching. And some environments aren't nearly as bad as others.
I tend to agree that comment discussions aren't as useful, even ideally, on a site like PopSci.