[wruza]

That could erase forum-ness of people and turn comments into a big heap of voices. Personally I wouldn’t like my forums if they were just a random people hanging around. Moderators and implicit rules do form what a forum is, what you do on it, but with “just comments on URI” all will be lost. While your wish feels great, it has downsides, since as an entire humanity we’re still not ready to discuss anything.

[wild_preference]

Just seems like a downgrade to posting it on said forum.

For example, now you need a UI that enumerates the articles that have comments on them. Maybe new comments even bump to the top. Starts to sound like a regular forum but with a small gimmick to me. There’s a reason this never caught on.

[machiavelli1024]

You can configure your client to ignore comments unless they’re verified by [authority you trust]. Verification would happen cryptographically; like the GPG web of trust. It’s up to you to choose which moderators you subsrcibe to, if any.

[here-for-karma]

Could maybe try some machine learning for moderation. I'd imagine the non-contributors share some amount of the same communication patterns.

Every time I see a problem that requires a lot of repetitive work that most people would not like to spend a lot of time doing, I always try to think of how it could be automated with computers that don't get tired