I clearly remember stages in my life and particular forums in which I have been exactly 'bad', 'confused', and 'good', and this seems like a useful distinction.

I clearly remember stages in my life and particular forums in which I have been exactly 'bad', 'confused', and 'good', and this seems like a useful distinction. It requires much more forum experience to identify what kind of comment causes insipid comment threads than it does to write a good comment in the first place. That said, you could probably just measure someone's comment quality and their vote quality independently and get a lot of the benefit, with fewer errors from rigid categorization.