This article was originally shared on Medium and has been republished with permission.
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> At the FT, subscribers who comment are up to four times more engaged than those who don't, and commenting does more for habit strength than anything else. It is also one of the rarest behaviours on the site > The fix was deliberately small. Two-thirds of the way through an article, a single short question inviting readers to pause and, if moved, join the discussion below > Generative AI proposes three questions per article, the editorial community team picks one or edits it, and nothing publishes without a human. The aim is scaling a slow task, not replacing judgement > The prompt does the heavy lifting: chain-of-thought reasoning about the article first, then rules on tense, abbreviations and opening phrases, shaped by research sessions with the community team > Comment views rose 3.5%, and 11.5% of readers who hadn't looked at comments in the previous month did. The unplanned win was tone, with fewer off-topic rants once people had something specific to answer
FT readers often say they value the comments section.
