Thanks for the feedback. Couple of things:

I know you hate tags, MK, but you were wrong about that.

Keep saying it loud enough and long enough, and someone will start to hear you. I have had tag arguments with mk many times, but as I am a minority partner in this venture, I lose! I think that tags are democratizing in many ways, not curatorial. Actually, they're far more curatorial when only one is allowed, because it forces users to choose this tag over that tag, and to try to develop a "culture" of what tag X should be. But anyway, I know I'm preaching to the choir.

You don't want to have your comments over-run by trolls because your community policing methods are "comment assholes out of the code." You want to build an infrastructure where your community maintains your community and your resources are linear, efficient, and go to eleven.

This is perhaps an intractable problem, but it's one that we think and talk about all the time. I was reading a story about teaching climate change that someone posted earlier from NPR, and even the comment section there is just riddled with garbage, albeit not the level that, say, a Yahoo! News article gets. Currently, the strategy we are adopting is to let the blogger have the same controls that a submitter has on Hubski. That is, a muted user can't comment on your posts and not much else. It isn't really our intention to make this a platform that any old website can sign on to. We have a few more contributors in mind that we will extend this service to once we're confident that its not buggy. Beyond that, we're not really sure, and I think we all have a little different vision for what this can (should) be.

In the end, no matter what we do with it, or whom we partner with, the problem of encouraging good commenting will not go away on its own. None of us wants to play whack-a-mole (troll?) with dicks, but is there an alternative? I guess my question is, is this a physics problem or an engineering problem? If its an engineering problem, then there must be a solution. If its a physics problem, then whack-a-mole it is, I suppose.

What does "scalability" look like to you? You have a lot of experience on Reddit, and I do not. My only experience comes from Hubski, and I don't think this small community is a very representational cross section of the internet as a whole. For example, if you write something controversial and you get 500 replies that essentially say, "Suck my balls, loser," how do you respond? Or, more importantly, how do you think the website should respond? Obviously, we can't control users, but we can control the code they interact with.