From one of the Disqus comments:

Which piece did you read?

Though seemingly innocuous, this comment gets much closer to an ad hominem attack than to a throughtful conversation. The rest of the comment is ok, but it’s with slips like these that we get into flamewars.

Sounds like solving the problem with comments is a priority to many, but approaches tend to diverge. Some content publishers have decided to turn off comments, because of perceived issues with the “signal-to-noise ratio”. Others adopt a community management approach, enabling people to monitor and moderate comments as a special type of a group effort. Annotation brings this approach to a new mode, though people may not comments and annotations as occupying the same sphere.