I think it's a vicious cycle. The more blog drama (AA killed my dog!) which gets through, the more people who like blog drama are drawn to the site and up-vote

I think it's a vicious cycle. The more blog drama (AA killed my dog!) which gets through, the more people who like blog drama are drawn to the site and up-vote it. If I were PG, I would look at the data and try to categorize the type of submissions which draw the most negative comments (and I think we still do a good job of -4'ing useless comments) and set a high threshold for a story of that type to get through to the front page. As another example, if submissions about 37s tend to be really vitriolic, make it harder for those submissions to get through and make it harder for people with a history of incendiary -4 comments to post in them. The bottom line is that there is a lot of data collected here which can be used to optimize the content towards quality, since we all seem to be talking about the same thing when we talk about quality.