When weblogs first started around 2000, one of the things I really liked about the community that briefly formed was that you had to reach out to make connections to people. I actually favored weblogs that didn't have comment sections at all for this. If some jerk decided to copy & paste your every post and troll as hard as possible in their own space, you could in fact go months without being aware of it, and even once you found out, all you had to do was... not visit it. No active action was required to avoid it.

Perhaps the core problem is that the "comment box" is a fundamentally unscalable tool. Instead of putting up a piece of content and letting everybody slap whatever they want on the end of it, maybe everybody needs to be given their own space, with no comment box. Maybe people should have to active seek out "comments" without having it pushed into their face. If "someone" built a system around that idea instead, perhaps we'd get a more stable structure.

(This, incidentally, harmonizes nicely with my other post that if you want to make money on this, you need to fundamentally rethink the whole situation and the entire incentive structure, not just create "X, but without ads!")