The project researches the history of online commenting since the early 1990s. It develops and uses tools to sample data from the Internet Archive and conducts interviews with producers, users and other web actors that can help to reconstruct a transformation of practices and technologies of online commenting. The project examines three popularization dynamics within that context:

1. The (semi-) automation of text production, quantitative rankings and community management,
2. the aestheticization of quantities, activities and text-paratext relations and
3. the platformization of commenting systems and the resulting oligopolies.