Every now and then, we still receive emails asking why there is no comment section on each mises.org page, and some even demand that we, the staff at the Mises Institute, create a comment section. In theory, I like the idea of a comment section, as it would be nice to see supporters make suggestion and add their own observations in a forum that is friendly to our readers. Unfortunately, when it comes down to actually moderating and managing a comment section, the negatives pile up much more quickly than the positives. There are a number of reasons why maintaining a comment section are impractical, and we learned this from experience in the past when mises.org did have a comment section.
One: Comment sections are a magnet for material that wastes the time of readers and moderators alike. Attaching a comment section to an article is one thing. It’s quite another to actually ensure that the comment section are not primarily composed of countless off-topic posts, ads, and personal attacks. Otherwise, readers end up having to scroll through dozens of worthless posts—i.e., ads and bizarre rants from apparently insane people—for every decent post that actually made a reasonable observation. Even with moderation, however, this is a losing battle, as the sheer volume of garbage content tends to be larger than content from real and reasonable people. Dealing with this is never without cost and requires spending on staff time that could instead be spent on the actual mission of the organization.
Two: Comments sections give a platform to bad information. Sometimes, people who want a comment section claim “I learned so much from the old comment section.” This is alarming since most of the information in the comments sections—with the exception of the rare comment that was actually informative—was bad information. This makes sense since many of the people who commented on articles were motivated to contradict and disagree with the articles. This meant the comment sections were filled with comments designed to convince people that the content on mises.org is wrong.
People are free to disagree with anything published on mises.org, of course, but I fail to see why it’s our job to expend resources to actually provide a forum and platform for people who attack our own research and authors. Trust me, there are many, many places where people can publish articles that are opposed to Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. So, people who don’t like our content are welcome to go to those places. There is no reason why mises.org needs to be in the business of helping people spread incorrect information about economics, history, foreign policy and more. Go do that at Jacobin, etc.
Even worse, many of the comments contained vile lies about people like Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard, and many others whose work and legacies we are in the business of supporting. Moreover, when an article happened to get an especially large reach, the comment section would inevitably be flooded with people who were vehemently opposed to the article. (Large reach brings much disagreement.) It’s hardly our job to facilitate that.
Three: Moderated comment sections make people needlessly angry. On any site with any significant amount of traffic—such as mises.org—the volume of inappropriate posts is so large that it becomes necessary to use automated filters to weed out at least some of the content. This, however, inevitably means that comments from well-meaning people are sometimes filtered out. So, staff then must spend time every day fielding emails from angry readers who say that their comments have been deleted or “banned” or otherwise prevented from being seen on the site. This happened daily. Moreover, most of the people writing in about their comments were irate and were sure that the filtering of their comments was evidence that the Mises Institute was conspiring against them. In many cases, we were told that the reason we “refused” to post their comments was because the Mises Institute had “gone soft” or lacked the “guts” to publish the “raw truth” provided by the commenter in question. Were there no comment section at all, of course, we wouldn’t have to spend time fielding these emails, nor would there be any “evidence” of a conspiracy to “hide the truth.” Readers would simply accept that there is no comment section and look somewhere else to post without convincing themselves that the Institute staff was conspiring against them.
Moreover, when irate readers would contact us about their missing comments, they would also often claim that we were “censoring” them or violating their freedom of speech. Obviously, our more intelligent readers never said this because they knew that freedom of speech does not include the “right” to publish comments on someone else’s privately held web site. Nonetheless, the existence of the comment section prompted many readers to convince themselves that if their comments went unpublished—either on purpose or accidentally—this was “censorship.” This daily grind of politely dealing with people who became angry and insulted over the status of their comments was—and is—a large incentive to not have a comment section. After all, few sane people claim that a lack of a comment section on a web site constitutes “censorship” of the public. It’s only when there is a comment section that some people suddenly decide that the owners of the site must absolutely print anything and everything every member of the public wishes to say.
Ultimately, the existence of a comment section actually leads to many people feeling that they have been personally wronged by the Mises Institute and its staff. This acrimony is easily avoided by simply not having a comment section at all. We’re used to getting angry emails from people, of course. There is countless enemies of freedom and sound economics who let us know about it regularly. But if we’re going to enrage people, we’d rather it be over something that actually matters, and not over someone’s feelings of entitlement about a web site comment section.
After all, mises.org is not some small town newspaper tasked with fostering local debate over the town council’s decision to install a stop sign on the corner. The Mises Institute has a very specific mission of promoting Austrian Economics, honest history, and international peace. The mission is not to provide chat rooms for people who disagree with our mission and who want to post a 5,000-word screed explaining why Murray Rothbard was wrong.
Given all this, it’s difficult to see how a comment section actually improves the site, or improves the reading experience of users. Those who wish to comment on our podcasts and books and articles have many choices in social media. And, of course, anyone can start a Substack devoted to criticizing our work every single day. We’re just not going to provide space to do that at mises.org.
