I used to moderate a fairly large discussion site and the level of discourse was kept pretty high simply because of the high quality of what already existed. We had a couple of persistent trolls and the absolutely most effective thing we did to them was a little coding trick where they would see their own replies within a thread, but nobody else could. Why the PD does not at least ban usernames is beyond me; the more persistent will register another username (and you can often combat this with IP bans) but it will get rid of a large percentage of the bozos.

A change in architecture would also go a long way–at the end of each story, a user should be able to click once to see all comments. (This paging through to read comments, three to five at a time, is nonsense from every perspective; you either want to read comments or you don’t.) That way if you’re not interested in the discussion, you aren’t confronted with it, especially with the moderation after the fact as the PD has it.

I really love reading the comments on the stories that deal with history; the articles about the Admiral or the Arena or whatever. Sharing memories and information is a tremendous use of the technology.