Can Gawker reinvent blog commenting?

For years, the Gawker network, which includes Gizmodo, io9, and Kotaku, has fought a battle against commenters, particularly trolls. The huge blog network is driven in many ways by the comments on the site and founder Nick Denton doesn’t like it. He went so far as to call comments on his sites “a joke” at SXSW and said the promise of thoughtful discussion never materialized.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “It’s a promise that has so not happened that people don’t even have that ambition anymore. The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership – that’s a joke.”

Now, they’re going to try to reinvent the way comments happen and how the interaction occurs on his site and others, making everyone a moderator of their own comments. Details are limited, but this isn’t the first time they’ve attempted to reinvent the commenting system.

We can’t wait to see what it looks like. In particular, how they will attempt to bring the discussion around to include rebuttals and rebuttals to the rebuttals is intriguing. Will it work, whatever “it” is?