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[The fol­low­ing post is my sub­mis­sion to the Knight-Mozilla “Beyond Com­ment Threads” chal­lenge.]

The fol­low­ing are the core prob­lems with cur­rent dis­cus­sion systems:

1. Trolls, acri­mo­nious peo­ple, and low qual­ity com­men­tary can drown out thought­ful dis­cus­sion and destroy a good community.
2. Bias towards senior­ity: Deep insight is penal­ized if it comes from a new, unknown, or anony­mous voice. For exam­ple, on Quora, answer­ing a ques­tion one month faster than some­one else can lead to a rich-get-richer phe­nom­e­non where the old answer gets more upvotes because it is always shown as the top answer, and hence has more vis­i­bil­ity merely because it is older. Nepo­tism cre­ates arti­fi­cial fric­tion and a barrier-entry, because it is an effec­tive tech­nique for enforc­ing com­mu­nity stan­dards. But it has the down­side that it discriminates—gently or extremely—-against insight­ful new com­men­ta­tors and anonymity.
3. Vot­ing sys­tems can be gamed by vot­ing rings and bal­lot stuffing.
4. Vot­ing sys­tems can lead to “mob rule”.

How do we address all these core prob­lems in tra­di­tional com­ment­ing sys­tems?
How can we cre­ate an engag­ing sys­tem that most effec­tively pro­motes dis­cus­sion? Can we avoid nepo­tism and bias against new, unknown, and anony­mous com­men­ta­tors? How can we defend against basic trolling and vot­ing rings?
A next gen­er­a­tion dis­cus­sion sys­tem must address these core problems.

The core value of a dis­cus­sion sys­tem is to encour­age stim­u­lat­ing and engag­ing dis­cus­sion. We want a sys­tem that is fric­tion­less to par­tic­i­pate in: You can lurk for years and then jump in when you have some­thing great and insight­ful to say, and your voice is heard loud and clear. This is true democ­ra­ti­za­tion of discussion.

The solu­tion is per­son­al­iza­tion. A next gen­er­a­tion dis­cus­sion sys­tem is per­son­al­ized. Per­son­al­iza­tion makes dis­cus­sion more stim­u­lat­ing and engag­ing. Each user that reads and par­tic­i­pates gets a com­ment thread that is sorted by per­sonal rel­e­vancy. Irrel­e­vant com­ments are hid­den by default, but can option­ally be viewed. Per­son­al­iza­tion is tuned to pro­mote dis­cus­sion that the user finds stim­u­lat­ing and engag­ing, and hid­ing dis­cus­sion that the user finds off-topic, spammy, exces­sively or insuf­fi­ciently detailed, etc.

The beauty of per­son­al­iza­tion is its flex­i­bil­ity. It does not force a par­tic­u­lar style of dis­cus­sion. If the user enjoys:

• heated dis­cus­sion back-and-forth discussion,
• calm dis­cus­sion with well-reasoned but con­cise arguments,
• in-depth aca­d­e­mic discourse,
• tabloid-like ad-hominem, or
• trolling and hate speech

then the user gets what they want.

Addi­tion­ally, per­son­al­iza­tion is adapted on a per-topic basis. One par­tic­u­lar user might enjoy a heated dis­cus­sion about abor­tion, a calm well-reasoned dis­cus­sion about NoSQL data­bases, and low-brow dis­cus­sion about celebrity romance. Per-topic per­son­al­iza­tion can sat­ify all these user needs.

I can dis­cuss more details about this approach, includ­ing how to:

• cap­ture per­son­al­iza­tion infor­ma­tion through user inter­ac­tion with the dis­cus­sion board.
• incor­po­rate atomic commenting.
• fed­er­ate dis­cus­sion across mul­ti­ple sites and lib­er­ate dis­cus­sion from a sin­gle site.

I can also dis­cuss pos­si­ble objec­tions to per­son­al­iza­tion, and my response to them.
Due to space lim­i­ta­tions (500 words), I omit these details for now, and focus on per­son­al­iza­tion, which I believe addresses the core prob­lems of tra­di­tional dis­cus­sion systems.