I've heard that dKos has more unique visitors per month than the Fox News site. I've seen a screen shot of a dKos diary on the Google News front page. We're a source of news and analysis, but we're also a community that talks to itself. This creates a conflict which may have a partial socio-technological fix.
A problem: In the standard, "nested" view, the recent diary on electronic voting fraud had 12 screens of reminiscence about antique text editors before any substantive discussion of current -- possibly urgent -- fraud scenarios. This illustrates a familiar problem, but trying to get people to rate enjoyable off-topic comments as "2: marginal" isn't a solution. Chat, jokes, even personal messages in diary threads, are all part of what makes dKos a community.
A suggestion: Because diary comments are not created equal, we might benefit from having a better way to say what we're creating. What if we had two buttons for posting comments: "post" and "post side remark"? These might work like this....
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