"Clicking a 'View All Comments' button is a mild manifestation, I suspect, of the Freudian death instinct."

"And yet there is something narrow, and basically anachronistic, about this view of 'the comments' as a phenomenon restricted to the unconsecrated ground below the line. Because it is possible to think of the Internet itself, in all its incomprehensible vastness, as an exponentially ramifying network of commentary and metacommentary. It’s comments all the way down. Social media, at any rate, and Twitter in particular, are a continually metastasizing accretion of marginalia..... The mind blanks at this sheer volume of commentary generated with every elapsing second, this unreckonable tonnage of weigh-ins...."

Much more at the link in a New Yorker article titled "It’s Comments All the Way Down," written by Slate’s books columnist Mark O’Connell. The underlying book in question is "Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web," by Joseph M. Reagle, Jr. The book might not tell you anything you don't already know. As O'Connell puts it: "Reagle too often seems happy to wrap up his discussion of a given topic with a tepid valedictory pronouncement. 'We all have opinions,' he writes at the end of one section, 'and many do not hesitate to express them at the bottom of the Web—even when they are less than informed.'"