I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.
On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.
You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.
On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.
You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.