Comment by ALittleLight

I think one should not expect that every comment on a hot button issue is good, but that a good place to discuss hot button issues would reliably have good comments even if many or most were bad.

Another way to think about it is: my average comment quality, if I commented on everything I read, would be very low. For most things I just don't have that much to add. So, for most things, I don't comment. Nothing to add? I just move on. The nature of hot button issues though is that they are more likely to elicit comments. They're lowering that innate "Do I have anything to add?" threshold. The result is that average comment quality declines - but their still could be good comments.

Writing this makes me think about a different approach than I'm seeing suggested in other comments here. Less rules and moderation based, and more sorting based. Up and down votes aren't quite right, you get reddit and echo Chambers. But, they aren't entirely wrong either. You need a way to elicit lots of comments (hot button issues) and mitigate the bad ones.