It's the selective nature of their disabling of comments. Notice on this very article, at the top, is a link to a review by The Guardian of Swift's new album, and comments are enabled for it.
Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.
They used to have comments enabled on most stories. I remember, from the time they were covering Snowden, all their stories seemed to have comments enabled.
I believe they largely shut down comments for a couple of reasons:
- Like a lot of newspapers, they feel very strongly that they have to moderate comments very aggressively. They didn't use automated systems to do that, because often the comments they wanted to delete were highly scored, so they ended up paying an army of moderators. That's not affordable for an organisation that loses tens of millions of pounds a year.
- As their columnists got crazier the comments got more vitriolic. It became commonplace for me to read a loopy story and go down to the comments to find people pointing out factual errors by the writers, or flaming them for their extreme opinions. I think the staff got tired of commenters trying to bring them back down to earth.
Nowadays they only rarely seem to enable comments. Presumably to keep mod costs down.
Both articles are obviously opinions, so why the difference? Only thing I can think of is one is more likely to see a backlash in the comments (because the article is ridiculous and deserves it) than the other.