I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on. Outsourcing to other communities seems great, b

I agree entirely. I've found comments below the story to generally seem outmoded and often jarringly tacked-on. Outsourcing to other communities seems great, but I could imagine NPR doing well with a Boing Boing BBS / Discourse model and effectively offering their own community board (subreddit, if you will) auto-threaded with their content. Then as somebody potentially having a serious thought in a comment you don't feel ghettoized to the bottom of the page, speaking to who, the author? Rarely does the threading in on-page comments give great visual direction to feel like you can engage other commenters or the author you are responding to in any manner other than "broadcasting" (or maybe a better word is screaming).