> There are often moderately stupid comments far down the page in any given thread, but they're comparatively harmless, like someone walking down the street mum

> There are often moderately stupid comments far down the page in any given thread, but they're comparatively harmless, like someone walking down the street mumbling to himself. I see that you deem these comments to be comparatively harmless, but nevertheless to combat this one relatively simple idea is to implement a 'Request deletion' feature, sitting alongside the 'flag' link on comment headers, that would notify the user that the comment they've made isn't very useful/substantive/thoughtful, and if they delete it (as other users have requested) they can re-earn any karma points they may have lost (as an incentive to encourage them to go on with the comment deletion). I think something like this would be very appropriate for a lot of occasions, it's something between a 'downvote' and 'flag' in intensity -- a downvote is too soft; 'flag' is too strong. I think it would send a good hint to have one reconsider what they've said, and have a lasting effect on the kinds of comments they make down the line. > I've been collecting a corpus of them for a while; it may soon be big enough to be useful. If you end up doing this I hope you only take into account the first few critical upvotes that send a particular bad comment to the top of the page. Because, I think 'upvoting' is a very passive, sometimes thoughtless action to a lot of people: if a comment is at the top, they'll read it first, and if it has non-zero substance to it (i.e. it attacks the article on a minor nitpick (which is your definition of a 'stupid comment' in this context, I think)) they may very well upvote it making the cycle complete.