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I think the comment quality is quite high here given that it's such a dynamic site. I'm hard pressed to think of another site with such story traffic that matches the comment quality.

It seems the solution to that isn't really technological, it's the community peer pressure the site creates. It's cultural, in terms of the culture of the site.

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One thing that could be done would be to go back to a -8 points limit for down votes which may reinforce better what are really bad comments. At the moment a comment with an unpopular stance that is decently written can go -4 along with plain stupid comments that would normally get down voted a lot more.

Alternatively; a two value system measuring popularity of the sentiment expressed and separately the quality of the post. So for example, a poorly written post with good ideas would be: legibility: -4, popularity: +4. This could be expressed as an rounded average or different users could filter by their own preference of legibility/popularity.

Of course this would all be a fairly major change to a system that isn't really broken so it's just speculative thinking on my part.

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