AUSTIN, Texas—The five-person team behind a simple WordPress plugin, which took three hours to code, never expected to receive worldwide attention as a result. But NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway’s largest national media organization, tapped into a meaty vein with the unveiling of last February’s Know2Comment, an open-source plugin that can attach to any WordPress site’s comment section.

“It was a basic idea,” NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. “Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it.”

The story has since been told a few times, but Grut’s recent refresh on the topic is just as compelling for its comment-section impact as it is for NRK’s thought process on how to make Internet media a better place: invite readers to have an active stake in improving it.