Motherboard's decision to close down its comment section in favor of a letters-to-the-editor feature has made some people unhappy, as has Reddit's announcement that there will be no comments on its new news site, Upvoted. Doing away with comments has become a slow but steady trend among online publications for many reasons, including: terrible interfaces to choose from, not enough resources to properly moderate, and prolific spammers.Now Digg, a former aggregation beast that has slowly but surely resurrected itself, is bucking the trend by bringing its comment section back.Called Dialog, it will function sort of like a live panel discussion, and be open several times a week. Designed to be more of a two-way street between readers and authors, each Dialog will be centered around a specific story. Readers can ask questions, upvote responses from others, and see live updates. Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin calls it "curated conversation," and it seems to draw upon Reddit's ever-popular "Ask Me Anything" threads, where notable people open themselves up to questions from the community.The similarity between Digg Dialog and Reddit's best-known feature is striking, because Reddit became popular partially as a result of Digg's collapse. Digg's first iteration was bogged down by its comments section, which was full of toxicity and spam. The site also struggled to reign in power users who had figured out how to game the site's ranking algorithm. When it imploded in 2010, users decamped to Reddit. Since then, Digg has had an uphill battle rebuilding itself. (The brand was bought by the startup collective Betaworks and is now maintained by a team in New York.)Digg is hosting a Dialog every day for the rest of October to give readers a feel for the new format, kicking off with a conversation with writer Paul Ford about his forthcoming feature on Wikipedia for The New Republic.Dialog will also have clearly stated rules: no spam, no abuse, no threats. Let's hope this time they can keep those rules enforced.
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