Imagine a world where you can get an RSS feed of all the comments that you leave, to save for reference or repost as your comment blog. A world where you can subscribe to all the comments that another person leaves across different journals. Imagine a world where you can post a video comment as easily as a text comment. A world where you can simultaneously Tweet your comments to your Twitter account. Where other readers can rate your comments, and those ratings shape your reputation as measured in points. A world where the owner of the journal where you're commenting can change how your comment is displayed, with a note that the moderator edited the comment, but the original unedited comment is retained in your commenter profile. Where comments and reactions to your journal posts in other journals and on other services -- blogs, delicious, Twitter -- are automatically aggregated and appear as links in your posts' comments. Imagine a world where readers who don't have an account with your journal service can post comments under their Facebook account.

What is this brave new world, that has such features in it? A commenter's paradise, a nightmarish dystopia, or just another alternate universe?

It's called Disqus -- a free, third-party hosted comment system that can be plugged into other platforms like WordPress and Drupal, but not journal services built on LiveJournal code (and yes, Disqus does allow for threaded comments and email notifications).

Comment cultures -- the norms, expectations, values and practices that coalesce around commenting systems -- are driven by both social and technical factors. The tensions, conflicts, and debates thus play out differently in different cultures.

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ETA: see also the sequel to this post.