Its an interesting point. I haven't even read the article yet, but have been reading the comments. Maybe they were the star of the show all along.

Someone on the NCSA Mosaic team had a similar idea, but after they left nobody remaining knew what to do with it or how it worked.

It took me 20 years to decide maybe they were right. A bunch if Reddits more tightly associated with a set of websites and users than with a centralized ad platform would be fairly good - if you had browser support for handling the syndicated comments. You could have one for your friends or colleagues, one for watchdog groups to discuss their fact checking or responses to a new campaign by a troublesome company.

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