In reply to Paul Lawley-Jones.

How is it not censorship? There's nothing wrong with this type of censorship -- it's generally a good thing -- but that's what it is.

The odd/interesting thing about creating a crowdsourced layer of culled comments is that it creates a totally different world for the people in that layer that will only last as long as the app and its users. It takes discussion away from the blog authors and turns their comment section into a kind of troll honeypot most people will regard as the "real" discussion unless the deflame app is advertised prominently near the combox. Some authors may want to participate in the deflamed layer; others may feel hijacked even if they generally like the result. It's also not a system that's immune to being overrun by bands of dedicated trolls.

If a big news site adopts something like this that will be really interesting. Traditional journalists have come to hate comments for the most part, but they're also likely to see this solution as a loss of control for them and also a loss of the free and open public sphere they're supposed to create.