It's amazing how much we have done, yet how horrible even the best commenting systems are.
People continue to complain that easy one-liner jokes consistently dominate the top ranks in Reddit threads, but Slashdot already came up with contextual upvotes (Funny, Insightful, etc) years ago.
Of course every time someone comes and tries to build a community we end up reinventing online comments from square one...
Somehow, that made things ten times worse.