It is certainly the biggest issue with the idea. I thought about having a checkbox in a reply. Also there could be a side pointing vote arrow. So if you place your comment in generic category you would only have a side- and a down- vote buttons. If your comment gets more side-votes then up-votes it becomes generic (maybe after a threshold). Also people who's comments are too often made "generic" by community or moderators would not be trusted as much on "on-topic" comment votes.

Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments.

As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do.

Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.

Is your downweighting process driven by manual reading through threads or are there signals that draw your attention to potentially-downweight-worthy subthreads?

edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.

It's mostly manual. Readers often email us cases that need attention, though, and that's super helpful when the top subthread is a generic black hole. If you see one, and have a minute to alert us at [email protected], we'd be grateful! It's probably the single biggest thing moderation can do to improve thread quality, and we can't read all the threads.

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