I came across Flow by accident intending to comment on another Wikimedia page. I've been fiddling about with it for about ten minutes now, so I'm probably fairly close to the sort of person you want to encourage to comment more - someone who can just about remember basic Wiki markup, but who doesn't edit regularly. I use a modern browser with Javascript turned off
There seem to be some usability problems at the moment:
- There's no indication of what (if any) wiki markup code you can use in a comment. The only thing that indicated it could be used at all was links in a few comments.
- There's no preview facility, so I've no way of knowing whether this is going to look right (except writing it in a sandbox and pasting the markup into the comment box - which I'm not likely to bother doing).
- You can't see a whole discussion on a single page. (I tried to alter the URL to get the next 10000 comments hoping it would stop when it ran out, but it just gives an error. Of course, a "Load all" button would be better.) I suspect this will lead to lots of comments that say much the same thing, that were written in good faith because the user simply didn't see that someone else had already made their point. (This may be true of the whole of this post!)
- It doesn't seem to allow for differences in people's signatures - which is the sort of fault that's going to cause controversy among the experienced users. Considering the comment authors already have a rollover on them, how about using the user's standard wikitext signature for the normal display and adding the username in a standard format to the rollover text?
TL;DR: it's OK for casual conversations, but for serious discussions it needs improvement.