I started reading the FT because it was suggested to me by an older mentor of mine. It seems common for people to also recommend The Economist or the WSJ, but neither of those quite hit in the right way. It appears that the comments were disabled for The Economist and the team had difficulty sourcing quality comments. I think on both design and content, no other paper comes close.
I used my school account to see the WSJ to see what the comment sections were like. Despite being a paid newspaper, it was surprisingly amateurish, but I can’t tell if it’s the design choice and font as much as the content. The profile picture and formatting just seems to work against the WSJ. Quality is often hard to separation from presentation, which is why I’m not a fan of people putting everything onto Substack. They are homogenizing their presentation to be the same as everyone else. People in the FT comments also like to hate on the FT, but I think it’s still worth it so far.
But the FT is not just news. I read it for the comments. There are useful insights into a variety of topics: hi-fi audio, MBA experiences, life, and so on. Janan Ganesh’s posts are quite a hit, striking the right balance between controversy and truth. The topics that cover life itself bring an emotional character. And I would hope to attend one of the in-person events one day.
Later on in the comments (made me laugh):
The design of my articles section is heavily inspired by the FT and I hope to cultivate a community and comments section around certain topics. To limit low-quality discussion, I may create some sort of LLM bot that guards it, but I wonder how that’ll work when single-line comments punch right at the perfect time.
There are a few trolls who always show up in the comments section for any geopolitical matters. The FT naturally has an Atlantic tilt, but it’s owned by Nikkei, so I don’t exactly understand how all that ties in.
I would heavily recommend reading the FT if you are a student and have a free subscription.