More commenters increase the rate of great comments per hour

Yep - to the point that it's becoming hard to keep up.

If we "fix" the issue that is holding people back from participating, we may risk creating a worse one, where overload causes people to stop participating.

One of the things I like about LW is how people have longer memories than elsewhere (it's one thing that keeps us from returning to covered ground); we are often linking not just to past top-level posts but also to past comments.

But that requires keeping up with a lot of discussion. Even those of us who are fast readers with good memories and a "blink" capability for identifying which comments are worth reading and responding to... are only human and have limits.

I'm not sure how scalable the model is that makes the LW-of-today valuable to me, and presumably makes it valuable to others also.