I like the idea of a inside jokes from sub communities. There was a cool talk about this recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I think a good unified commenting system that allowed for friending would be an alternative.

If comments from my friends boiled to the top of Disqus, it would be the best of both worlds. For Tipjoy, I had been thinking that using Disqus could be useful for comments if we could feed to and from the original thread on a blog.

So commenters could tip the blog poster for useful content, and likewise the poster could tip commenters to reward intriguing comments. Commenters could tip fellow commenters. Lurker nonmembers could tip everbody.

Yecch, I fat-fingered that.