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A Farewell To Comments

Love them or hate them, Above the Law comments are going away.

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goodbye farewell beach shoreThis summer, Above the Law (“ATL”) will turn ten. The web has changed a great deal in the past decade, and ATL has evolved along with it.

One area where we’ve seen a lot of change: reader comments. In the early days of ATL, especially before the Great Recession, the comments were amazing. A single story could get hundreds of comments, most of them substantive, thoughtful, and related to the subject matter of the story. Yes, the comments could sometimes be edgy or offensive — which is why in January 2009 we tweaked our layout to hide them, requiring the reader to affirmatively click into them – but the value they brought to the table outweighed the offense.

Today the comments are not what they once were. Although occasionally insightful or funny, ATL comments nowadays are generally fewer in number, not very substantive (often just inside jokes among the commentariat), yet still often offensive. They also represent a very small percentage of our total traffic (as we can tell because of the click required to access them).

It’s not clear how or why our comments changed in number and quality. Did the layoffs of the Great Recession cause lawyers and staff to worry about sharing sensitive inside information about their firms on the web? Did the revelation of NSA surveillance by Edward Snowden make everyone paranoid about their digital footprints? Did the rise of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, redirect quality conversation to other venues? We don’t know.

What we do know is that the decline in comment quality is not unique to ATL. As noted by Wired, NiemanLab, and Digiday, numerous websites have eliminated their comments sections in recent years, largely because they felt that the comments were not adding sufficient value and that discussion had migrated to social media.

Inspired by these sites, ATL will also be eliminating comments, effective tomorrow. Since December 2011, individual writers have had the option of turning off comments on individual stories – and many columnists already exercise this option on all of their posts – so this is not as large a change as it might seem. We are simply replacing a discretionary approach with an across-the-board policy.

We are grateful to all of our readers who have provided thoughtful and substantive comments over the years. You have helped to make Above the Law the successful and vibrant website that it is today, and we will always be thankful for your submissions.

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And we continue to welcome contributions from our readers and thoughtful engagement with our content. We are simply changing the channels through which these contributions – including compliments, complaints, and corrections – are submitted.

First, contact information for the author will appear at the end of every article. If you have anything you’d like to share with that writer, large or small – a factual correction, a typographical error, an idea for a related story – we encourage you to reach out to the author directly. And, as always, you can contact all the ATL editors by email or by text message (646-820-8477).

Second, we welcome your engagement with our content on social media. Please take our stories and share them – on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your social-media platform of choice – and add your own commentary. We love it when our stories inspire a lively discussion on someone’s Facebook wall or on Twitter — and we find that these exchanges tend to be civil and substantive.

Third, if you value the more freewheeling nature of anonymous discussion, simply take links to our stories and post them for discussion on forums or message boards like Reddit, Top Law Schools, JD Underground, or AutoAdmit. The internet is a very big place, and our no longer hosting comments directly on ATL doesn’t stop anyone from taking the conversation elsewhere.

This is a significant change, and we aren’t making it lightly. It’s the result of countless hours of spirited discussion and even heated argument here at Above the Law over the span of several years. It reflects our thinking about the evolution of the web generally and also the evolution of ATL specifically, which has moved in a more mainstream direction over our decade of existence.

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Yes, we still offer – and we always will offer – the delicious gossip and irreverent humor that put ATL on the map. But this content is now joined by hard-hitting industry news, thoughtful opinion and commentary, practical career advice, and discussions of substantive legal developments in specialized areas ranging from marijuana law to assisted reproductive technology (“ART”) law.

Some of our more casual or occasional readers have a vision of ATL that’s frozen in time — stuck around, say, 2009. If you sit down and actually read through an entire day’s worth of ATL content, you will see how different the site is from its original incarnation. While we can still be fun, funny, and frivolous, on the whole there is a higher level of seriousness to ATL in 2016 compared to 2006. We work hard to generate content that we’d like to be taken seriously – and we believe that redirecting discussion of our content away from anonymous comments and toward social media is an important step in this direction.

What do you think of this change? Please find us on social media – follow us on Twitter, “like” us on Facebook, join our group on LinkedIn — and share your views.

And yes, you can share your opinions on the demise of comments in the comments to this post. This will be the final Above the Law post with reader comments, so please make your comments count.

A Brief History of the End of the Comments [Wired]
What happened after 7 news sites got rid of reader comments [NiemanLab]
4 publishers that killed their comment sections [Digiday]

Earlier: A Note to Our Readers About Comments
New Above the Law Comment Policy

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