How about users who are passionate, but polite? I can easily see this devolving into a popularity contest.
I’ve heard there’s this open source thing called Discourse, maybe they ought to look into it. Seems to work pretty well. 
This product sounds like total garbage, and @frauenfelder is dumb and ugly for writing about it. Obama, amiright?
Did they just hire more luck dragons?
Poe’s law, amiright?
Yes, they’re reinventing wheels. Ask boingboing how to implement Discourse! 
What does Discourse have to do with anything?
Comments existed on BoingBoing long before Discourse came along and the nature of the comments was about the same thanks (I believe) to active moderation. One thing I preferred with the old system was having comments were on the same page as the stories.
I think Reddit’s comment sections are surprisingly high quality when you factor in the number of participants. It’s also much more dense (which I prefer) and way faster.
DEvolving?
The Alaska Dispatch News JUST adopted this. They claim they are the biggest client so far. The comments sure sucked before and you could only comment through Facebook, so I am hopeful.
Look at reddit. You end up with comment sections that are ideologically biased. Even though it’s in the reddiquette to not use the downvote as a disagree button.
Pretty much this. The civility here has a lot more to do with the moderation than the platform.
“Comments are broken”
Great. Now I have a Cat Stevens song stuck in my head.
I don’t see any real way that this would be an improvement over the Slashdot moderation system, which works very well, when you have a community that is inclined towards civility and enough critical mass for it to work. If you don’t have the second, then you really need active moderators, and if you don’t have the first, than good luck getting any system like this to work.
Also, civility is not really the only relevant metric. Calling out someone for repeating a lie that is verifiably factually incorrect is often not very civil, because your calling them a liar, but the ability to do that is essential for any kind of discourse at all on a lot of subjects.
There can be only one!
