Should you read the comments?

[packbat]

Yes.

(Sorry, we're in a mood today, so we're just ... making a blog post. This is an essay in the most I-don't-know-where-it'll-go sense.)

On a very basic level, a comments section represents an aggregation of interpersonal connection. It represents an audience being heard not as hecklers, but as annotators, commentators, afterwordists. It connects Vienna Teng songs to AO3 fanfics, connects Paul Simon songs to those cherished dead who loved them, connects dodie songs to survivors seeking peace. It tips off machinists to better techniques, lets nonfiction writers know that their conclusions are heard, articulates shared reactions that they can be felt together. They are those rare moments when a movie is felt so strongly that strangers linger together in the lobby afterwards to process what just happened to them, made omnipresent.

They are communities. Sometimes ongoing communities - the second place we came out as trans was a comments section. Sometimes transient ones - we do not even know the name of the stranger for whom we wrote a review of a Negativland album in the comments of a music video.

No-one would tell you "don't read the comments" if you had no reason to read the comments.

...there are spaces where abuse runs rampant. There are rooms in which the loudest bigots in existence seek to crowd out all other voices. We are harmed by these comments because they betray us in the font of our connection with others.

Sometimes those represent people being under attack - a doctor who does not have the time or knowledge to manage a YouTube comments section, whose pro-trans comments went viral in just the wrong spaces.

...okay, all of them represent people being under attack.

But a lot of the time, those toxic comments sections represent a community whose leaders chose or accepted that toxicity.

Yes, read comments. But don't read them on hate sites.