Ask Slashdot: Going Beyond Comment Threads?

asa writes "The Knight Foundation and Mozilla are running a series of news innovation challenges. The goal: get the world's smartest hackers thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web. The current challenge is all about comment threads. This seems like the perfect question to pose to Slashdotters: how would you foster more dynamic spaces for online news discussion? How would you preserve the context of online discussions and stamp out trolls? All ideas, technical, practical or impractical are welcome. What technologies (federation, atomic commenting, moderation, algorithms) would you employ? What are the immutable social dynamics? Knight and Mozilla will work with the best challenge entrants to deploy the solutions in newsrooms at Al Jazeera English, the BBC, boston.com, The Guardian, and Zeit Online. Submissions are open until May 22nd."

Comments

Three paths

[symbolset]

Full identification like Facebook, moderated semi-anonymity like slashdot, full-on unfiltered anonymous chatter. Each has fans and faults.

So make three tabs and call it a day.

I mean maybe I'm missing something, but is there a rule that there has to be one best way?

Everybody choose their own view.

[migla]

How about everyone getting to choose their own way of tagging and displaying every comment and user with an optional added numeric modifier for every tag?

Some days I might want to see (or hide) for example what the most popular "+3 Constipated"(and up) comments from anyone modded at least "+2 United-Fruit-apologist" by self described "Anarcho-Marshmellowians". At other times I might choose something less ridiculous, involving tags like "Conservative", "Insightful" and the like.

One could also choose to view comments in the style of reddit or slashdot (except maybe everyone would always have points, so the slashdot style would be filtered by mostly most popular moderators calculated in some way.)