Replied to Experimenting with turning on comments for a week (Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel)
I noticed a general downwards trend in the quality of online comments.

Hi Doug,
Glad to see this. There has a been consistent drift to twitter & other social for comments. I think this is a pity for several reasons.

I am responding to this with a webmention, which it looks like you have adopted. I’d hope that the quality of comments received via webmention might be better given that the comments will be published on the commenter’s own site. These might be less knee-jerk or throwaway than a tweet or toot?

There are still a few wrinkles to be ironed out of webmentions but I have high hopes that they will be more widly adopted and be a good thing.