It all depends on how things are run. On some sites the comments are written by people who are borderline illiterate. On others the comments are insightful.

It all depends on how things are run. On some sites the comments are written by people who are borderline illiterate. On others the comments are insightful. I am somewhat hesitant to say it, but a good policy might be to charge people a small fee (like $5/yr) to post comments. Much of the trolling and illiterate nonsense would be would be filtered by such a system, at least from what I have seen in places like Metafilter or the WELL. Edit: or we could do things mailing list / Usenet style and just have people run spam filters on their own. Of course, some NGs are overrun with noise that makes them almost unreadable. Also, most computer users are not sophisticated enough to actually set up a killfile or spam filter on their own.