Problem:

• Attractive commentary is insightful and pithy, but forums do not accumulate pith. Forums bloat with redundant observations, misread remarks, and misunderstanding replies unless the community aggressively cull those comments.
• Having your comment dismissed is unwelcoming and hurtful. Even if we know that downvotes shouldn't be hurtful, they are.

Inspiration:

This thread.

Proposal:

Dismiss comment button

Bob writes a comment that doesn't carry its weight. Alice, a LW reader, can choose to up-vote, down-vote, or Dismiss Bob's comment. Dismiss advises the community that a commentent may not be worth reading, but does not notify the comment's author (Bob).

• Anyone who Dismissed Bob's comment would see it as folded (or even removed)
• Bob would not see his commment as folded.
• Anyone else who didn't dismiss Bob's comment might or might not see it folded, depending on their ("Don't show me comments with a score less than x") preferences.:
  • For the purposes of Karma folding, Alice's dissmiss would count as if it were -1 karma. If Bob's comment had a karma score of 1 and was Dismissed once, users who fold comments with scores of 0 would see Bob's comment as folded.
  • If Bob's comment were for Alice's article, Alice's Dismiss would count as if it were -3 karma for the purposes of comment folding. This allows article authors quickly nip off-topic commentary.
  • If Bob dissmissed his own comment, it would also count as if it were -3 karma.
• The total number of times Bob's comment was Dismissed would be invisible to all users. If he really wanted to, Bob could set up a puppet account, vary the ("Don't show me comments with a score less than x") field until his comment was folded, and from that infer the number of dismisses on that comment. If Bob does that, I don't particularly care if his feelings are hurt.