For what it's worth, Disqus is actually the one company that fulfills my criteria of being "lunatics who are willing to spend years relentlessly sweating every detail, who understand that every pixel and every click really, really matter … even though it is “just” comments".

Reading through all the comments above, there seems to be a terrific amount of misunderstanding with regard to how these systems work and, more importantly, how site visitors work - some of the arguments I've read here against hosted comments are exactly the reasons why they are ideal for smaller sites with a high proportion of first-time or infrequent visitors.

I don't want to get into a drawn out clarification but, in short, if your goal is to give your comments section as much chance as possible to gain the momentum necessary to sustain a community who will keep coming back, use Disqus.

It boils down to incredibly small yet insightful decisions, such as keeping the number of both Up and Down votes visible, giving you an immediate visual cue to which comments are the most contested, most agreed with or, most fascinating of all, the ones that divide opinion right down the middle.

Those simple, tiny Up and Down arrows are the most effective onramp to interaction yet invented, the most non-threatening invitation you can extend to your site visitors, and it is all too easy for hardened commenters like us to forget how difficult that first toe-in-the-water was.

Again, you need to be someone who comments a lot in order to understand why touches like that put a rocket under discussions and, as I said, it is obvious that most decision makers (and especially the decision makers at the big news sites such as Engadget, Techcrunch and Mashable) are not, themselves, regular comment-writers - they understand sales people but not comments, and that is why abominations such as Livefyre still exist.