...or provide some real community moderation
Or better yet...
Institute an actual moderation feature like on slashdot.org.
The idea there is that regular readers get the opportunity to be moderators every once in a while. Users that are moderators have a couple days and a couple moderation points to play with. As a moderator, you use your moderation points to add or subtract points to/from the point totals for each post in articles that you have not replied to yourself.
The effect would be that the (currently useless) point totals next to each post would be changed at the discretion of an ever-changing and representative sample of the readers.
Once the point totals meant something, each user could set the filters to hide comments below a certain point threshhold.
That way, if you wanted to read "first post" gibberish, you could, but if you wanted to cut to the chase and read the comments that add some meaning to the original story, you could filter out all the offtopics, flaimbaits, and me-toos.