

Comments: that thing where you upvote what you like and downvote what you dislike, and if you feel strongly, say the same thing 10 other people said in different words. Very important. Very necessary.
Honestly a sidebar with a chat like IRC, but every message being tagged by which specific article its author is viewing right now, would help the social part more.
I mean, Telegram’s convenience is a weapon. If you want a good UI for article feeds with comments, it should just copy Telegram. Except for the Russian intelligence services part.
As the poster above, I should clarify that the reason I mentioned Telegram is that there a channel (like a blog) has a representation as a group chat where channel posts, comments to them and simple group chat messages appear.
And about communities and issues - the problem with comments is that they are local to post. Separation by posts first, then separation by threads, separation by score ranks, separation by depth. That may seem like a nice idea to not see everything. That’s the very problem.
OK, so the data model wouldn’t have to be changed to make it in good sense like Telegram.
What you need is ability to have a linear representation, where every message is additionally marked as a comment to some post or as a reply or as a post itself, and might have scores.
Like old forums usually were, tree representation wasn’t very popular.