zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.

>>tptace+t
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it.

Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your total number of comments) you'd actually get kicked off the site temporarily.

>>pg+52
I think the idea of categorizing comments is good. I would cite as a somewhat-working example Wikipedia's article flags. Wikipedia has a serious problem with deletionism, but they have ways to mark articles in meaningful ways, like too long, or too short, or irrelevant, or excellent, etc. They can also mark individual contributions as "citation needed" (a flag I would really like to have on comments, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423582 as an example of a citation-needed comment getting, I feel, way too many upvotes).