The interesting thing Disqus brings to the table IMO is a persistent identity across sites. And, broadly, I think this is good in that it fights the inherent hi

The interesting thing Disqus brings to the table IMO is a persistent identity across sites. And, broadly, I think this is good in that it fights the inherent hierarchical structure of any commenting system. Ultimately, though, the concept of comments are hierarchical in a bad way. They encourage shallow responses over depth, and banter over meaningful conversation. I think the best thing to encourage signal over noise is to encourage persistent identity and ownership of comments by the commenter. And I think the only real way to do this is a distributed reference system. Imagine something like Tumblr (or now, in G+), in which users can re-share others'posts and add their own content. Imagine a distributed version of this, in which instead of comments, you have other people's responses hosted on their own sites, which your browser could aggregate into a comments-like "response" section, where you would have the option to view them in any way you'd like: newest/oldest-first, threaded/non-threaded, etc. I wrote a lenghthier post on this a while back: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/3112676038/the-end-of-comments http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/3112676038/the-end-of-comment...