It's easy to complain about the comment sections of news websites. It's harder to improve them. They're as problematic as they are essential, and no single website seems to have gotten the balance just right. Comment moderation is time-consuming, and often more trouble than it's worth-especially for sites with relatively low traffic. Spammers and troublemakers can discourage meaningful dialogue between writers and readers just as easily as poorly-designed and confusing commenting software can.
Meanwhile, the traditional news story format is stretching and evolving to include blogs, explainers updated in real time, and automatically "Storified" aggregation of social media content. It doesn't make sense to leave the comment thread behind.
"Beyond Comment Threads" is a Knight-Mozilla challenge to radically reimagine the traditional comment format-and they're doing it by imagining they are starting from a blank slate. Along the way, everything that has gradually become commonplace over time must be questioned. For instance: Why do so many sites display comments chronologically, when it makes so much more sense to group them in thematic conversations? Why should a comment written on the bottom of one story always be associated with just that one story, isolated from the rest of the online conversation that's happening externally from that website?
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