That's easy: comments like break the site guidelines and are bad for HN.

I don't want to pick on floren personally, though. That account has a fine posting history and seems as concerned about comment quality as you are (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039487). The problem is rather that most bad-for-HN comments are unintentional, at least once you scrape out the bottom of the barrel.

As for HN's reputation vis-à-vis Reddit, I think that's been pretty stable for years now.

You happened to catch that comment 3 minutes after it was posted. When I came to this thread not 15 minutes later, the comment was already flagged so much it got collapsed. There is no cause for alarm or doomsaying.

Comments don't get collapsed when they are flagged, they are collapsed by moderators manually.

Either way, the system clearly works.

It was flagged because I pointed it was useless.

I can't make a comment asking every single fluff comment to please elaborate a bit more just so people go "oh, huh, yeah this shouldn't be here". And you can't deny that in the last N years, HN has become more and more happy to upvote fluff.

I can indeed deny it. I think you are also giving yourself too much credit. I would be very surprised to see a comment like that one not at least colored grey, even without your heroic involvement.

You can deny it, but you'd very well be wrong. You've been a user since 2017, so I understand if you're not familiar with what the discussion looked like circa 2014 or so, but it used to be much less tolerant to the low-quality comments that get posted nowadays.

This user is from 2017. I've read Hacker News for a long time. I think you need to get over yourself a bit.

Downvoting works, and it takes very little time.

Neat but I read the site literally every day and have posted for years and don’t have the ability to downvote. Perhaps I’m on a blacklist of ex-slashdotters.

There’s a karma requirement. If I recall correctly I gained the downvote when I passed 500, but I could be wrong of course. My impression of this site is that they don’t do blacklists, they’d probably warn you straight up if they had a problem.