If something like this were to see wide success, that would potentially take a big use case away from Google Search, no question about that. You pretty much have to use Google Search in many cases if you want to find out what other people are saying about a given website.

And if malicious comments are a problem on the platform, then that's a failure of the design of the platform rather than the idea of it. The nature of commenting as it exists now dishes out proportional exposure to those who are the loudest and most persistent, or can otherwise game the system. We've tried to solve that with human moderators (sometimes as bad as the trolls themselves), and simple voting algorithms (lowbrow meme humor gets voted to the top).

It's now 2019, we're long overdue for a better way of doing things. Taking two steps backwards toward a completely unmoderated soapbox is a non-starter, and the fact that we're even having this discussion on HN is evidence that far too little effort has gone into solving these problems collectively.