Are comment sections dying, or have we just gotten worse at making people talk?

I’ve been noticing something weird across my clients’ accounts lately.

Views can go up. Shares can go up. Saves can go up.

But the comment section still looks like:

“so true”
“this 👏”
“😂😂😂”
“need this”
“love it”

I used to spend lot of time reading comment sections because sometimes they were more interesting than the actual video. People argued, added stories, corrected each other, asked questions, went completely off-topic.

Now a video can have 500k views and the comments somehow feel like an empty room with 800 people saying “yes.”

I’ve been testing different CTAs, questions, controversial endings, leaving information out intentionally, etc. Some things move the needle a little, but the median comment quality barely changes.

The obvious exception seems to be informational content. Give people something to debate, correct, or add to and suddenly they have paragraphs to write.

Problem is, informational content doesn’t make sense for every brand or client.

So I’m starting to wonder if this is less of a CTA problem and more of a behavioral shift.

Maybe people consume short-form content much more passively now. Maybe we’ve trained audiences to treat comment sections as another reaction button. Or maybe creators have optimized so aggressively for retention that we’ve forgotten to leave anything worth discussing.

For people managing multiple accounts: are you seeing the same thing?

And more importantly, what has actually increased meaningful comments for you lately?

Not comment count. Actual conversations.

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zmbieklr•about 2 hours ago•1

I’ve definitely seen this happen with paid views - a ton of views and almost no actual engagement. Not saying that’s what your clients are doing at all, but it can definitely create numbers that look impressive while the comment section is basically crickets

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