Who needs quality in comments? Certainly, not the old media. All they need are clicks, views and users' engagement.
It's quite often to see an obvious flamebait promoted to a "featured comment", etc.
At Yahoo, we tried a little to improve comment quality.
We tried to rank comments based on its text quality using machine learning (some of the features were hate words, grammar error, CAPITAL letters).
We hope that seeing well written comments at the top can trigger a better discussion than just top voted ones.
Here is the paper: http://ip.com/IPCOM/000230875
