We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra: www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to get users addicted.

We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in the mainstream it's a huge problem).

We are currently thinking about the best way to do notification aggregation (Facebook does this very badly - several comments on the same conversation will give you several different notifications) and marking-as-read. We have several interesting options in test at the moment.