Are comment sections really all they’re made out to be? While most news organizations welcome user feedback in some form or another, the debate is far from settled as to whether comments help or hurt online newspapers. Intended to encourage intelligent online discussion—but often dominated by vicious trolls, or users who post inflammatory statements for no reason other than to provoke others—comment sections clearly have both their pros and cons.

In an article from the Animal New York website, which is currently redesigning its format, Joel Johnson asserts that most comments are not intellectually stimulating or educational, but rather just spam and “drive-by internet hate.”

“Comments are a dinner party,” Johnson writes. “If I’ve invited you to have a seat at my table, at least have the courtesy to not call me an idiot for serving you food slightly different than you preferred…”

Johnson also suggests that the cost of monitoring comments outweighs the editorial benefit that insightful comments might bring.

He writes, “comments are likely a cost-of-doing-business for most content sites, not a revenue generator. This has been somewhat known for years for any high-volume site that is forced to require human content moderation—humans cost money, whether they are hand-moderating content, shepherding conversation, or building automated tools to allow user-moderated content.”

The Boston Globe's recent decision to hire outside help to moderate its online comments, reported by Media Nation, is the latest event to prompt discussion on the different means news websites have in dealing with an overflow of readers' comments. The newspaper joined NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle as clients of ICUC Moderation Services, a Canadian company specialised in moderating online content.

Niemen Journalism Lab spoke to Keith Bilous, ICUC's president, about the benefits of outsourced comment moderation. According to him, hiring outside help both frees up newsroom resources and provides a possibility for a discussion about the function of readers' comments generally. "The focus is on getting more better-quality comments and conversation on sites instead of 'let's just get as much comments as we can.'"

Bilous noted that when it comes to improving online discussion, different companies have different objectives. No one wants to see potentially libellous comments on their website, but some questions, such as whether to audit comments before or after publishing them, have to be answered separately in each case.

Freedom of speech is a basic principle on which democracy depends. But the right to say anything you want can teeter-totter between a sharp nod of agreement from some--with the underlying hope that people will use their best judgment in paying it heed or not--and a slow, quizzical shake of the head from others that suggests "I'd like to say yes, but ... some things are better left unsaid."

NPR is of both minds, and currently struggling to strike the balance. To serve a broader interpretation of the U.S.'s first amendment, the radio news organisation is allowing more liberal use of language and tone on its Facebook page. American Journalism Review writes that in this forum, conversations tend to be more casual and offhand than on the official website. Rather than adhering to polite dialogue in the comment thread, "our Facebook users are snarky and swear like sailors" says Andy Carvin, NPR's senior strategist.

Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team have a lot to celebrate this year. According to Mashable, Facebook is the single most popular website in the United States accounting for one out of four page-views and 10 percent of all internet visits.

So what exactly does this mean for the social network site that revolutionized the entire concept of 'social media' when it exploded on the scene in 2004? Facebook hit its 500 million member mark this year, and is now thought to boast over 600 million members, having seen "an enormous 55 percent year-over-year increase, which brings it to have 151.13 monthly unique visits in the United States alone." And Facebook has recently launched a push to persuade its users to make the site their homepage, seen as a direct attempt to take on Google.