Somehow I feel bad about "articles with drastically lower entry requirements". If something is really, really... how to say it... for example if it's just a hyperlink to some article without providing a summary, or an idea expressed in one sentence and then "Discuss!"... uhm, just no. That's for a Facebook status, or a chat. If someone is lazy to write, then perhaps they just shouldn't write; maybe it's better to have less content, than lazily written content.

However, I wouldn't object against having a separate "Open Forum" category (as in: "Main", "Discussion", "Open Forum"), moving all Open Threads into the Open Forum, and perhaps even creating a new Open Thread every day (preferably automatically by a bot).

I would also encourage users with upvoted (say, karma about 10 or more) top-level Open Thread comments to rewrite those comments as "Discussion" (potentially maybe even moved to "Main") articles. I mean, they already received a positive feedback from the community, so there is no need to fear. But I mean rewriting, not merely reposting. I don't want to encourage sloppy posting, only to encourage users. (To prevent the "maybe I will spend an hour polishing the article, but probably no one will like it anyway, so why bother" thinking.)