The difference here is that Genius overlays its annotations on top of the main article. From a design, and even a business POV, this means the content of Genius and the news website are "merged", i.e. not clearly separated. Disqus Comment Threads can easily be hidden or shown and segmented from the text of an article. Reddit plugins like the one you mentioned are installed by the user's choice.
News Genius however, has aspirations of being your go to site for reading the news. So this adds an additional bar for Genius to clear (i.e. make it work well without pissing people off) than your normal aggregator.
Never-minding the substance of the original article, observe how News Genius says "We’re annotating this not just to discuss Garner’s career and apparent acquiescence to the “minivan majority” but to analyze the way movie stars in general appeal to particular demographics and what that says about society." and then see the annotaters descend into snarkiness and children's fare.
If I was interested in the subject matter, I know which version I would read, and which version I would warn others against reading.
News Genius however, has aspirations of being your go to site for reading the news. So this adds an additional bar for Genius to clear (i.e. make it work well without pissing people off) than your normal aggregator.
Compare this: www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/jennifer-garner-minivan-majority
Versus this: http://genius.com/8863764/www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen...
Never-minding the substance of the original article, observe how News Genius says "We’re annotating this not just to discuss Garner’s career and apparent acquiescence to the “minivan majority” but to analyze the way movie stars in general appeal to particular demographics and what that says about society." and then see the annotaters descend into snarkiness and children's fare.
If I was interested in the subject matter, I know which version I would read, and which version I would warn others against reading.