Spot-on

Mathew Ingram:

But the reality is that when it comes to improving blog comments, anonymity really isn’t the issue — the biggest single factor that determines the quality of comments is whether the authors of a blog take part in them. […]

In the end, it’s not the tool that matters, it’s the connection that it allows with readers, and that can’t be automated.

It’s difficult not to notice how good Ingram is at relating such a narrow topic — commenting systems — back to human behavior as a whole. The lesson here isn’t that someone’s better than someone else; the lesson here is that you can’t automate caring.