Comments didn’t die; the economics of running them did.
Publishers didn’t close their comment sections because readers stopped wanting them. They closed them because the maths didn’t work: moderation was expensive, the reputational risk was real, and nobody could demonstrate a return. Community sat on the books as a cost, tolerated rather than managed, and eventually switched off.
Kevin Kallenbach has spent twenty years watching that calculation from the inside, in ad sales at Madsack and the Bild Group, then in digital at publishing software company Sprylab Technologies, and now as CEO of Ferret Go, the Berlin-based company whose Conversario platform processes over 30 million dialogue events a month for clients including FAZ, RTL, Der Spiegel and Greenpeace. His read on why publishers got community wrong is characteristically commercial: it was never a technology problem; it was an economic one. The technology to moderate at scale exists. What most publishers lacked was a viable model …
