That's a good point. It could be that since we don't know how to scale curation (and use upvotes as a proxy), we exacerbate the problem of lurkers not having their (few) comments discovered.
As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.
As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.