[brennen]

> Rather than finding a technical solution or one that involves moderation

There are no technical solutions.

(There is, at best, tooling which helps to some extent but which can easily backfire.)

Moderation is necessary and difficult. Skilled human hours must be spent. Humans with the temperament and skills are rare and likely to suffer burnout. Organizations rarely value community management skills in proportion to their necessity and the difficulty of acquiring them.

Even where community management is valued, moderators are often forced to walk a narrow line between exercising power to shut down bad actors and having their authority undermined by their own organizations when bad actors complain, especially if those bad actors can be conceived of as customers.

To put it another way: Before you latch onto the view that removing comment sections is about suppressing dissent, consider life from the perspective of someone whose job it is to moderate comments.