[fivedogit]

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.

Words benefits from the fact that it's web-Wide. If a user is terrible, they get silenced everywhere.

You're totally right (as was Paul Graham when he spoke about how Hacker News is evolving) that these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing. Just look at Digg.

So I definitely anticipate badness down the road, but feel the code foundation is there to deal with it as it comes.

[visarga]

> these sorts of systems get worse the larger they get. And that getting too big too fast is definitely a bad thing

I was thinking about it - why not add a view mode displaying only the comments of the early adopters? On reddit, for example, it would be interesting to see only comments of users with accounts 5+ years old.

[mplewis]

Gawker's network effectively does that by focusing on only Featured Comments when you scroll down and making you click through to the plebs.

[fivedogit]

I thought about this idea -- only displaying comments from users with high ratings or whatever -- but decided it would break conversations. Users would see comments, but not some responses or worse, some responses without the original comment, etc.

[frankacter]

>One of the problems with other commenting systems is what I call The Clean Slate Effect. If a troll is sucky on site A, then goes to site B, they start over with a clean slate and can continue being sucky.

How is this different than any other 3rd party commenting system like Disqus or Facebook?

[fivedogit]

So. Many. Reasons. Just give it a try and you'll see.