The web has changed drastically over the past 10 years. The capability of the web, how many people we can reach at any given time, is huge! It’s not about your content driving your site, it’s more about what people have to say to relate to your content. The web is a community of people that want to share and discuss with one another.

This article by Mashable points out their goal to encourage quality commenting. Todd Olmstead explains how they are looking for a way to aggregate the highest rated comments onto the homepage or the ability to display high rated comments at the top of comment stream on individual stories.

Essentially he’s bringing up the idea of the community generating content for websites, kind of like how “Letters to the Editors” work. Commenting is not much different than social media platforms either. This is an interesting way to see how communities can mold a website into a powerful and valuable one.