The reddit comment system is not that good and has been duplicated many times. Almost every comment system is comprised of multiple recognizable elements. 1. T

The reddit comment system is not that good and has been duplicated many times. Almost every comment system is comprised of multiple recognizable elements. 1. The presentation (this is probably what you meant). Reddit's comment threading and hiding is excellent. /. does something very similar, but with more decoration. 2. The voting system. Reddit's comment system is for rewarding comments that contribute to the discussion for some value of "contribute". Instead it's used as a popularity score, which has resulted in the same problems you see in Stack Overflow where accuracy falls prey to enthusiasm (for good or ill). The systems that do not have a "downvote", instead starting at an anonymous (or some incremental) threshold. I thought maybe a floating filter based on the average or some group-specific setting or a manual setting (e.g. /.) would be optimal, but there are some readability problems that can only be solved with good presentation. I have not seen many that have good presentation AND technical sophistication because the last item is a deal-breaker. 3. Automation/tooling. Manual and/or automated moderation + bot mitigation is a fairly complex issue. Thread locking, deletion, account banning, anti-spam measures are not things that traditional media are prepared to deal with. You find they sometimes just abandon or delete articles that have been bot-slimed. Reddit's tools are a combination of watchful (time-investment) community leaders, automation, and network level blocking. 4... there's probably more, but those are what comes to mind.