Did you see the comments?
Nothing makes a millennial light up more than hearing that phrase.
In the early aughts, conversations on the internet were harder to find. A message board at the bottom of a fan club page. A chatroom inside a forum. A guestbook on someone’s Geocities page.
Nobody was optimizing any of it for your attention. The “algorithm,” such as it was, was just whoever happened to check the thread that day.
Then social media slid into our DMs, not long ago but also 22 years ago, where you could visit a person’s profile and post something. They liked it, and then maybe they came back and did the same for you. It was still basically that same message-board logic, just with a face attached to it and a “friends” list.
The feed came next, and with it, the great migration. We abandoned our Top 8 and our profile song in favor of the boring platform with one compelling feature. Everybody, everything, all at once.
Your Top 8 were people who knew you. The feed is millions who don’t. Posting got bigger, conversation got smaller. Yet the comments are still sitting right under almost every post.
So, why does your thumb go there first?
Why People Read the Comments Section
You’re running to the comments. It’s human nature.
Somewhere between your first AIM screen name and the thousandth little red notification dot, the internet stopped being a single room and started growing deeper and more dense. The thick, tangled layer underneath the posts, unseen from above, the comment section became the layer doing the real work of holding the whole thing together.
However, what people have always wanted from the internet hasn’t changed: say something and have a person say something back. Down in the comments layer, it still happens, with one person or a handful. A reply. A stranger agreeing with the exact thought you didn’t say out loud. A joke that lands because someone was actually paying attention to you.
It also happens when it goes badly. The same layer holds the pile-on, the drive-by insult, the argument with a stranger at 1 a.m., that you somehow can’t walk away from. That’s human nature too. The warm parts and the vicious ones because both are proof that someone is on the other end.
The conversations worth having, and the ones you’ll regret, are a few layers down.
Parasocial Media Explained
Cornell communication professor Danah Boyd has a name for what the feed has turned into. In a 2026 essay, she argues that two decades after the term “social media” was coined, most of us do a lot more scrolling than posting. We watch content made by an increasingly small, professionalized class of creators, served up by an algorithm that never once asked what we wanted to say back. The word “social” no longer fits, she says. Her replacement: “parasocial media.”
Parasocial describes a one-sided relationship. You know your favorite creator’s dog’s name, their morning routine, and which oat milk they’ve sworn off. They have no idea you exist.
The numbers tell the same story, and they’re stark. Research on online participation points to something close to a 90-9-1 pattern: Roughly 90% of users consume without ever contributing anything, a small slice contributes occasionally, and a tiny fraction produces most of what gets broadcast. Posters are the minority. Lurkers are the room.
“Lurker” is an old message-board word, a holdover from the same forums where this story started. Back then, it was a slightly sheepish label for the person who read every thread and never replied. Now it describes most of us.
The feed stopped talking back. So your thumb goes looking for the one part of the app that still might.
How Kids Turned an NPR Podcast’s Comments Into a Group Chat
The need for community doesn’t go away just because the architecture around it changed. Sometimes it just finds the smallest, least-lit corner and sets up there instead.
Last year, a producer at NPR’s Wild Card noticed something odd happening under one of the show’s Spotify episodes. A flood of strange, clipped comments that looked, to an untrained eye, like bot spam. It took a younger colleague, who recognized the pattern from her own middle-school internet habits, to explain what was actually going on.
About 20 kids, mostly 11 to 14, had quietly turned the comment section of an obscure NPR podcast into their own group chat, as This American Life reported in September. Several didn’t have social media apps of their own, so they built a messaging system out of Spotify playlists and comment threads instead, and they picked NPR specifically because almost nobody else was commenting there. They weren’t chasing an audience. They were hiding from one in the one corner of the internet quiet enough to actually talk in. The adult in the room couldn’t recognize any of it as human. He needed a translator.
Why Are Brands Commenting on TikTok Videos?
And then there’s the opposite instinct entirely. Comment sections that aren’t hiding at all but performing in broad daylight, with brands cast as the surprise guest stars.
There’s a TikTok genre right now built on exactly this: People filming themselves on a seven-hour flight or from a hospital bed before surgery, with one premise—watch how many brand accounts show up to comment before landing or before they wake up.
One creator, Michael Usterbowski, filmed himself in a surgical cap, headed into a three-and-a-half-hour surgery, with on-screen text that read, “let’s see how many verified people/brands comment by the time I wake up.” The replies kept coming. IKEA Norge answered “Gotchu!” Bubble Skincare sent “Good luck!!!” and Tootsie Roll turned up nearly two months later with, “Better late than never!”
Another trend counts brand replies across long flights. The footage itself is almost beside the point. A plane seat, a hospital bed, nothing much happening. The entire draw is watching the comment section fill up like a scoreboard.
Notice what’s actually flipped. For most of the internet’s history, brands talked and you listened. Here, a stranger with a boring flight decides when a Fortune 500 marketing account shows up and performs, and the brand obliges, on command, in public, for an audience of commenters who are, for once, calling the shots. The brands aren’t just winning engagement. They’re being directed.
Inside the Comment Ranking Algorithms
So why does one platform’s comment section feel completely different from another’s? Because none of it is organic. It’s engineered, on purpose, by people making a deliberate bet about what a reply is even supposed to be.
Reddit has ranked comments since 2009 so that a good reply can win even if it shows up late. Being first isn’t enough to win the thread.
Instagram and Facebook hand everyone their own version. Meta says an AI system predicts which comments you’ll care about most, so two people can look at the same post and see two different top comments.
X went the other way. It has put its recommendation code on GitHub for anyone to read, and it lets you flip a thread from algorithmic “Top” to plain chronological “Latest.”
Every one of those is a company deciding what kind of room you’re standing in. So the comment section shaping how you feel right now was designed to do exactly that, whether or not anyone told you going in.
The Toxic Nature of the Comments
Phil Melito, a principal product designer at HealthBook+, makes these kinds of bets for a living, even in a space as far from social feeds as health care. Asked what pushes a space toward real conversation instead of performance, his answer came down to one simple factor.
“I think it’s the size of the audience,” he says. “If it’s more one-to-one or a smaller group, people tend to be more genuine. But when there’s a larger audience—for instance, a YouTube video that has over a million views—people are going to comment to perform or make people laugh or react.”
Masks make it worse. No face. No name. No accountability. “We tend to hide behind our comments in a larger group,” he says, “especially if we are anonymous.” Design can help, but, “It can only go so far when the larger system presents outrage or attention above meaningful conversation.”
His fixes are small ones. Threaded replies make clear that “you’re responding to a specific person,” which means “more of a back-and-forth,” and a character limit keeps one person from hijacking a thread with a long diatribe.
The upshot is hopeful. The gap between a comment section that connects people and one that performs may come down to a settings menu nobody questioned. So if you’ve ever felt a little gross about how much time you’ve spent in a thread, popcorn in hand, that’s not a character flaw. It might just be the room you’re standing in.
Why Doesn’t Seth Godin Allow Comments on His Blog?
Not everyone’s convinced any of this amounts to real connection though. And the strongest version of that argument deserves its say before this piece lands anywhere.
Seth Godin has blogged nearly every day for two decades, and he’s never allowed comments on his own site. Asked directly whether comment culture might make writing more honest, his answer didn’t leave much room for debate.
“Reciprocal? Hardly,” he says. “It’s very much not that.”
His objection is about what happens at scale. “One troll interrupts the experience of hundreds of people,” he says. “A troll who starts a fight and never returns. It’s performative, and the more people in a comments thread, the worse it gets."
He traces it back to incentive, not instinct: “When traffic is the goal, the other objectives of writing or video become secondary. And so the algorithm pushes creators to be divisive, short-term, or hyperbolic, and comments follow suit.” As he puts it, “The great books, movies, records, plays, and art of our lifetimes don’t come with a comment section.”
But his objection has a boundary. “The exception is one without anonymity, with persistence, with a community at work,” he says. Which is exactly what he set out to build with purple.space, a curated online community he began around 2023.
“It’s not anonymous, it’s gated, and the community is built on respect and connection.”
Twenty years after he first turned comments off, he says he’d make the same call again instantly, and he’d rather see people “start a blog and put [their writing] on your own front lawn."
His read on where honest reaction actually happens now is blunt: “Comments are not real or honest. Comments are performative and often shallow. Real and honest conversation has been around for 10,000 years.”
The part the NPR kids found by accident? The part Melito’s small-audience theory predicts? That’s what Godin is advocating for, just fenced off on purpose instead of stumbled into.
So, Did You See the Comments?
Turns out the real question was never are the comments better than the post. It’s who’s still willing to put their name on what they say there.
Reddit’s reputation-based ranking rewards it. A gated, non-anonymous space like Godin’s rewards it. Even the NPR kids, without ever meaning to, built something that worked because everyone in it already knew everyone else.
The version of the comment section that keeps failing—Godin’s trolls, Melito’s crowd-performers, the flattened anonymous pile-on nobody can trace back to a real person—is the version with no ownership attached to it at all.
None of this means comment more. It means comment smaller. Find the room where your name actually means something to the people reading it, instead of shouting it into a stadium that was never going to shout back.
Godin, for all his skepticism, doesn’t land on an ending so much as an instruction.
“When we own our words, discourse gets better.”
Featured image by Hanni sunnatul khusna / Shutterstock.com
