Set the douche bags aside, and some of the remaining comments do have value—I agree! But that’s a strange response, falsely set up in opposition to those who make the case for removing commenting functionality from a publisher’s website. An argument for the end of comments isn’t actually an argument against the value of comments. They just don’t belong at the end of or alongside posts, as if they’re always some extension of or relevant to the original. They belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly. Hell, put them all on Medium, and let Evan Williams try to sell the douche bags to BMW. As Annemarie Dooling pointed out on Wired today, you’re not going to scare off all of the trolls by forcing commenters to use their real names on your site—that’s why publishers that have implemented Facebook’s commenting platform have some of the same problems everyone else does—but, if done right, you can push them under the bridge and make that bridge easy for everyone else to identify and avoid while at the same time encouraging a more thoughtful, considered dialogue that takes place across sites and between publishers.