I don't think you can eliminate the ugliness. That's okay. I think if you can somehow cluster the ugly comments together, let the ugly people have that discus

I don't think you can eliminate the ugliness. That's okay. I think if you can somehow cluster the ugly comments together, let the ugly people have that discussion, hidden from view, everything might work out. Perhaps textual analysis is enough, grouping comments by words, clustering by k-means. Similar to how dead accounts can still post here, ugly comments should be accepted, clustered into the ugly pile, and shown only to posters who use similar .. language. If my entire post is 'what a bunch of f__ing sh__heads', it wouldn't be hard to cluster. Then the public/non-logged-in view would default to the 'civil' cluster, with showdead/showugly as options, if you're into that kind of thing. I don't think you should stick ratings on people, just to comments. If people have any input, Zed Shaw would have a really poor rating, let alone Lennart Poettering. There's nothing inherently wrong with their comments, of course, so they'd likely be clustered 'civil'. I'm not too familiar with the domain-relevant quiz: that intrigues me. Could you imagine, a did you really read the article captcha? Of course the /. editors can barely fix the typos; creating reading comprehension quizzes is an enormous task. But if I'm the author of a post, I might could do it.