There's no real irony.  While anonymous-account sites can have reasonable comments, that's a function of size, really.<p>Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments.  Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time.  Now it's mostly a mess.<p>Similarly, Engadget used to be alright, then they grew and added the voting system... etc.<p>Frankly, what works for smaller sites doesn't scale.  At their visibility, Engadget should either go comment-less or do subscriptions for early-access and comments.  Anonymous comments just don't provide enough value with that much noise.