It sounds like their problem is solved by comment voting a la HN, StackOverflow, reddit, etc... But the article rejects these as not good enough or not innovative enough. I must be missing something they're shooting for.
Yeah, Slashdot kind of solved this a dozen years ago. It's an imperfect solution, but it's a 90% solution and I think that's good enough.
Part of it depends on content. If you're a real community, then having people sign up for commenting and rating comments is a good solution. It helps promote good content and the requirement to sign up keeps the community free of a lot of hit and run commenter who might often degrade the experience.
If you're a news site, then most of your content is from hit and runs (hits and runs?). You don't have people hanging around your site all day, waiting to post on the next story. You have Drudgereport linking to you and then a flood of mouth-breathers leaving a quick comment about "libtards" or "republicraps" or a quote from some religious text and so on. In these communities, the discussion will never be lifted up and no voting system will work, because nobody is invested in it. Further, if you require a sign-up, nobody is going to bother.
Then, there are blogs. Sometimes you may want people to have to sign up but in other cases, you might need or want to just let anyone freely comment without any hurdles. Nobody wants to go through a signup process if they're only going to see your blog once or twice in their life (when linked to from HN or elsewhere, for example). It's hard to choose the right path, here.
I think much of the answer comes down to two things;
1) Human moderation - both by the community itself and designated moderators - is very valuable.
2) Not every page on the planet needs to allow comments. Frankly, the local CBS news website doesn't need to accept comments on stories. Neither does the BBC's articles. Neither do most.
Of course, they have dismissed everything in this article, so the only thing left is for the government to require every internet user to use their real identity online and then have a single discussion/forum/conversation system that all runs on the same API (or have a standard API that ties together very different discussion/forum/conversation systems). Then, you will have no choice but to post as your real world identity and every comment you ever leave anywhere on the internet will be part of that identity and you will be rated on that identity, always. A truly unpleasant idea and I would rather put up with having to ignore the dregs of the internet versus losing the option of anonymity. Of course, people who live their lives in public often have a different view than this, since their personal desire is to get their own identity out there. Not everyone has that same goal or desire.
(I won't even bring up my distinct hatred of things like Disqus and Facebook whatchamacallit that sites implement instead of drawing up their own conversation tools).
pstack, I agree with you, but then I wonder how news sites like the Economist manage to make a voting system work even for extremely contentious articles. Any article on the Economist that mentions China or discusses bailing out a small European nation tends to explode into a frenzy of commenting, but the voting system over there holds up extremely well under pressure.
Regardless of the contention, the community at Economist.com maintains a relatively civil atmosphere. I have always been perplexed by this - especially because you can only upvote, no downvoting is in (yet).
The funny thing is that back in the day (when I first started commenting over there) they did not have any type of voting and it could get bad sometimes. Users begged for voting and we got it, now things are pretty nifty for all commenters.
Maybe it is because a different group of users frequents the Economist. In which case, the answer to improving your comments is to try to improve your sites culture?
I think the Economist might be one of the exceptions, where they are prone to less hit and run activity and have a more participatory readership of regulars. Compare that with any news or magazine site that you might click on right this very moment that is linked via Drudgereport, which I think is far more common.
> if you require a sign-up, nobody is going to bother.
Nobody is going to bother to hit-and-run, but people who read the same site over and over again and find themselves wanting to respond regularly will bother. I think that is a very good thing. If people are using persistent usernames, you also increase user-to-user connections.
Combine that with even rudimentary voting and downvote-based visibility and you've got, if not a 90% solution, at least a 75% solution.
People will absolutely bother to hit and run. Requiring registration makes moderation easier and keeps spam out a bit better.
Also, with voting systems, you run the risk of people using them as a bludgeon against one another. Sites like HN and others mostly work because the group of people commenting are very similar to one another. There's not a whole lot of reason to troll someone you mostly agree with.
One of the reasons why I quit Reddit was because so many of the most upvoted comments were ones trying hard to be witty OR memes. Same goes with some of the things that are upvoted on the subreddits.
