>since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters In my experience, the first few comments of a post are usually pretty low quality

>since the comment section quickly got mobbed by some pretty rabid commenters In my experience, the first few comments of a post are usually pretty low quality, but after a few hours, thoughtful comments are made, and the low quality ones are downvoted. In this case, yes, the initial comments were bad. But doesn't it make more sense to just downvote/flag those comments, and allow more thoughtful responses to bubble up? There's a discussion to be had here, and it's very easy on this site to ignore the people screaming.