I have been thinking about more participatory/active comments and discussion chains, on more general audience sites, a lot of comments are no more than quick validations of comments and the sort.
How about have a vote on comments; so if someone puts up something really witty readers can signify applause or some other positive. Likewise for troll comments it could have boo votes.
Might be able to do comment filtering, where only titles or less are shown on downvoted participants based on commenter's popularity track record, be able to review your votes to find comments you liked in the past, etc. Maybe discover you are a fan of a popular commenter.
I was thinking of this for a mobile based discussion to reduce noise... Always there's the issue of folks gaming the system.
