Poor Quality of the New York Times Website Blogs

The New York Times, certainly one of the most influential, profitable and important old media voices in the country, has staked its future on its website nytimes.com.
Part of this future that is different from the past is allowing readers to comment on articles; in the old days, the Times ran a half page of letters a day, which considering it's audience of a million well educated, vocal people, was a pittance (so, in the days of print only, it was quite a priveledge to get a letter in print, and some of them were really well written, and they were all letter perfect in spelling and grammar).

So, one might think that this new future, with lots of reader comments, is important to the Times to have high quality comment software, with lots of features, that make it easy and powerful for the user.
But they don't - they have a really stripped down, feature poor, buggy site.
the bugs are inexcusable; the lack of features shows that they don't understand why people post on websites.
paradoxically, if you look at the most succesfull sites, like slashdot and digg, they are feature rich, hard to use, and wildly popular; this has to do with how people interact with the web, which is driven by the ability to do things at the web site, and not just read or post.

Some examples of how the Times site is defective or second rate:
A reader can recommend a comment made by another reader, but you can't pan a comment made by another reader. If you go to slashdot, they manage to have a rating system that runs from bad to neutral to good. And, I have found over the years that this is one place where wisdom of the crowds works; most posts on slashdot rate high or low are high or low.

Another problem with the times website is that it is not possible to view all of the comments on an article in a single web page. f you go to an article that has a lot of comments, the comments are displayed across multiple web pages; which makes searching for things impossible (at least if you use the Cntrl+F find feature in firefox browser). Inasmuch as these are all text, with a small amount of hypertext, it can't possibly be a page load speed issue.
The Times does provide a member center, where you can see your comments, and the timestamp of submission, but since comments are moderated, you can't use tht time stamp to figure out where in a long (100s) list of comments yours is.

Another annoyance; if you login, after the login, you don't get returned to where you were, but instead have to figure out or remember exactly what page you were on before the login.

On top of these technical issues is the attitude that We are the NYTimes; take or leave it chump.
Not all articles allow comments, and the choices seem pretty arbitrary; you would think that at least they have a policy page that explains what articles allow commenting.

The times closes comments after a period, which seems arbitrary; in some cases, comments are closed when there are only 96 comments/article, which is really wierd.

Many of the Times reports are based on pdfs; while they have started providing links, they still don't do this for a lot of articles; my suspicion has always been that this is profit driven - if you are a times journalist, having the actual pdf that is the basis of your story could be the basis for another book or piece that makes you the reporter money; sharing it with your readers means you make less money as a journalist.