This guy loves reading internet comments, so he made a site that aggregates them

As anyone who has ever created anything for the internet will tell you, “don’t read the comments” is a golden rule on par with “never tweet” — both are sanity-saving, sound pieces of advice that will probably be ignored.
But Owen Willis actually loves internet comments. He loves them so much he created a website dedicated to them, powwow.
Willis loves internet comments because, to his view, they offer a unique, distilled essence of what people think — ugly as those thoughts may be. But there’s another reason Willis likes reading internet comments, and this one’s more philosophical.
“One of the things that frustrates me about the internet is that it’s really easy to get into an echo chamber,” he said. He’s right — the internet is essentially a giant collection of little, like-minded communities. And when you’re a part of one (or more) of these communities, it’s all too easy to get caught up in community things that might bear no resemblance to what’s happening outside.
This holds for groups sharing avocado toast recipes as surely as it does for those trumpeting each other’s horrible racist ideologies.
But just because you sit in your avocado appreciation community and #DontReadTheComments, doesn’t mean people with vastly different opinions don’t exist on the internet. When it comes to opinions, even horribly offensive ones, Willis is “of the mindset that not acknowledging that they exist gives them space to exist,” he said.
The point of powwow is to put internet comments out into the light.
It holds them up, individually and out of context, like weird anthropological specimens of human communication. In keeping with Willis’s interest, it takes comments from the ideological right and left and everything in between and removes them from their respective echo chambers.
Put simply — powwow is a stream of internet comments from news stories. The comments, which arrive via a scraping algorithm Willis built, are from sites like NPR and BuzzFeed and Jezebel and Gawker and Breitbart and Slate and more. Willis said he started with the sites he reads, and is slowly expanding while trying to keep a “well-rounded” (ideologically speaking) stable.
On the site each comment looks like this: click on the source name and you’ll be redirected to the original article. Otherwise, there’s no context.

At first, Willis told me, the site was an unfiltered stream of all comments posted on all the sites it scrapes. But this, he admitted, “was an overwhelming (and depressing) mess.” So now the comments you see on powwow are curated.
Wait, what?
Yes, every comment on powwow is now hand-picked, chosen from among thousands collected in the back end to appear on the front end. Asked what his editorial policy is, Willis said he tries to “remain objective.”
“The idea is to present a pretty full view of what people are saying on the internet,” he said.
But why? I’ll go ahead and admit, I generally don’t read the comments. It’s kind of a journalistic best practice and while I’m all about encouraging positive reader engagement, I find that, for a variety of reasons, this rarely takes place in the comment section. So maybe I’m just not cut out to appreciate whatever it is Willis sees in internet comments.
But I open up powwow and give it a go anyway. And yes, for a while there’s something strangely alluring about these disassociated missives. They range from funny to oddly poetic to completely unintelligible. But after a few pages all I can see is negativity and hate — my heart starts racing and I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with this gem:

I opt to close the tab.
Willis, who has a background in data science, tells me visitors to the site click through an average of three pages, and, at least among his current small readership, 60 percent of them come back for more later.
If I had to distill the why behind the creation of powwow I’d say it is, for Willis, one part entertainment, one part data and one part anthropological curiosity. “If there is actual value” to the site, Willis said, it lies in tracking internet comment trends over time — something that, because of the hand curation element, powwow would need a full-time staff member to do.
“It’s interesting to see what people get excited about,” he said, citing politics and Gwyneth Paltrow as two of-the-moment topics.
But Willis isn’t married to the idea that powwow has value. The current site is just a MVP, he’s still assessing whether or not people are interested. Maybe they will be and powwow will become some sort of bizarre success story, or maybe they won’t be and it’ll just be another weird thing that exists on the internet. In any case, it’ll always be that project that enabled Willis to learn to code in Python.
Oh, and for a guy who loves reading internet comments so much? “I never comment,” he said.