And here I was expecting the debate to be about threaded versus flat. :)
I wonder if there is a way to quantify the amount of engagement difference between the two groups. (I confess to skimming this article, so I may have missed this.) Basically, was the second group more polarized in beliefs, or simply more engaged? I saw that engaging by the author helps keep things civil. I did not see anything about whether there were more folks involved if that happened.
I've definitely soured on the idea of having threaded discussion in blogs. Or unmoderated discussion, for that matter. On the other hand, I think threaded discussion is great on sites like Hacker News which are divorced from the original content.
If I were to create a new blog in this day and age, I would only permit pre-moderated flat discussion on my blog, so I could publish interesting feedback and reactions - like an inline "Letters to the Editor" section. That way you give readers an effective way to "react" to the post on the page without opening yourself up to comment-to-comment discussion, spam, trolling and flame wars.
Knowing that the comment won't be published unless it is insightful will lead to fewer comments, but those who do comment will probably put extra effort into making the comment worthy of being seen. And really, the point of a blog post is the post itself, not the comments. Hacker news, in my opinion, is a way better format for real discussion sparked by a post, rather than reactions meant for the author of it.
The NY Times does this to some extent. Comments are moderated in batches. Comments within the first batch are about the article itself. Subsequent comments are made both on the article and in response to thoughtful comments that made it past the initial moderation filter.
Comments are broken by design. This includes HN, by the way. The problem is that commentators can receive approval and social validation for contributing nothing but middlebrow dismissals, tangential hobbyhorses, rehashes of the same damn Internet arguments waged since time immemorial, and in the worst cases, bad jokes and vicious flamewars. Maybe one out of ten, or one out of a hundred comments even approaches the depth of a decent article. And fluff articles are given refuge as host to these sticky but often useless discussions.
I like to think that some form of commenting must work, since commenting is just textual conversation, and I hope that conversation isn't fundamentally broken. I'll admit that a lot of conversation (even in person) is made of rehashes. I also agree comments attached to news articles are pretty broken.
I find commenting most rewarding in groups that have a medium-sized, long-term membership, so the community has some familiarity and shared ethos. A few mailing lists and web forums I'm on feel close to that.
Mailing lists can approach a higher level, but a lot of the great dialogues of history happened when people would write full-out letters and essays of their own in response to each other.
The closest thing I've seen to this online is when bloggers disable comments but keep trackbacks turned on. If you disagree with someone's blog post, write your own blog post and use a trackback to link it so there's still a conversation. This raises the bar for a few reasons. First, no one is going to keep a blog that has nothing but middlebrow dismissals or bad jokes, and if they do, no one will read it. Second, blogs have more of an identity and a reputation, so the author has stakes in the game greater than that of a disposable HN or Reddit account. Third, you can selectively follow a network of bloggers and if someone's a bozo, you just stop reading their blog instead of having to wade through their comments. Fourth, your responses on your own blog are more likely to be substantive because you have to make it worthwhile to your own blog's audience as well--introducing an issue and expressing your dissenting take on it can be worthwhile, but your standard drive by comment is not.
I sometimes like blog-reply conversations, but I find them more disjointed and harder to follow. Often it feels like three people are each standing on street corners with megaphones, vaguely gesturing in each others' directions but really, mainly talking to their own audiences, not engaging in direct conversation.
It's the direction I've gone myself, but partly for selfish reasons: I want to "own" my more interesting essays by posting them on my own website, rather than on someone else's. I don't really monetize it, but I think that's another motivator leading people to withdraw their good writing to self-publish on a blog: 15 years ago you might've posted something on Usenet, a mailing list, or Kuro5hin, but today you want to publish it under your own personal brand, and collect the traffic.
I think there are positive aspects to that, but the discussions and communities often feel less coherent as a result.
I used to love this site called Newsvine, because it had a lot of people who differed greatly in opinion, but were very civil.
But, than it was directly attached to MSNBC after it got bought out, and soon enough, each article had 300+ YouTube-quality comments and every article, no matter the topic, was just vicious political crap.
There's an obvious desire to expand audiences, especially when money is involved, but that's a pretty easy way to destroy the community if you do it wrong.
I wonder if there is a way to quantify the amount of engagement difference between the two groups. (I confess to skimming this article, so I may have missed this.) Basically, was the second group more polarized in beliefs, or simply more engaged? I saw that engaging by the author helps keep things civil. I did not see anything about whether there were more folks involved if that happened.