I think neither model provides a catch-all solution. Whatever mode of interaction with an audience fits best hinges entirely on a myriad of factors, both technical and non-technical.

Human communication, whether digital or analog, is a continuum. You could have a discussion via snail mail letters, online mailing lists, letters published in a paper, blogs who publish as if corresponding through letters, pamphlets and manifests, digital forums are a lot like message walls where people tack on strings of post-its, sites such as HN or Reddit are ultimately aggregators of links - numeric identifiers - turning them in catalogues of sort of content elsewhere,... and then there's the myriad of news sites churning out a continuous stream of succinct missives about any topic under the sun like a ticker tape, or a news strip.

There's two aspects to comments.

There's the technical aspect of a HTML form, processing submissions, compiling a list of submissions, and then integrating those as an assembly into a larger context: below an blog post, an article, a link, a video, a piece of audio,...

There's the content, published information, itself. That is, the origin item as first put out there by an original publisher, and then the ensuing flurry of opinions, additions, corrections, jokes, nonsense, unsolicited self promotions, and so on.

The complex interaction between those aspects, medium and message, has been the subject of fields such as communication theory and media studies. Most famously by Marshall McLuhan.

The convenience of having a way to express semi-anonymized opinions in the digital world at every turn and corner is, paradoxically, a boon and a curse at the same time. the affordances of combining and re-combining digital technologies to provide (new) modes of interaction between audience and the stage, tends to be at odds with what actually happens on the stage, what is being said in the fray and how it is being said.

The biggest pitfall in a discussion like this is losing sight of this intangible, abstract complexity, while reducing the modalities to plain technicalities and sterile theorizing over network models and effects.

Your questions may be relevant and important to you, but they they only carry value in the eye of the beholder. It's perfectly valid to promote as well as disparage the upvote/downvote system because of it's perceived advantages and disadvantages. It's also perfectly valid to completely do away with comments entirely as one might feel that they add little value to their outlet and tend to become a burden to moderate / manage.

(Tangentially, this is also why I take an interest in the Smol Web movement which tends to focus on self-publishing and content proper: https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...)

At the end of the day, there's a shared responsibility and it is not merely limited to the implementation of a particular policy or technology, but rather on a moral level: how each of us chooses to approach and treat others and what they bring to the table. And that's what really matters in all of this.

Moderation is an intrinsic part of governing a community of people. Which is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish by any measure. Being mindful about the drivers and motives that underpin online governance helps understand the decision making process that leads to preferring one way of doing things over another.