Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion s

Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion so it's easier to understand?" I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level. If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags)) This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.