But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.
Racism/Sexism/Bigotry can end up in logical fallacy territory pretty easily. "If women were unsuited for tech careers, there would be few of them in tech; there are few women in tech, therefore women are unsuited for tech careers" is a logical fallacy that I see around here pretty often. "Sexism" is just easier to remember than "Affirming the consequent".
But calling the problem there "sexism" has two major negative effects: it can lead you to believe that correct sexist arguments are flawed by their sexism, and it can lead you to accept affirming-the-consequent type arguments that aren't sexist. If something's wrong, you don't want to slam it for orthogonal traits, you want to slam it for the things that make it wrong.
But perhaps this is the problem of moderating comments on a binary scale of "good" and "bad".
A comment judgement/rating system that is more nuanced will not only help the readers to choose from but also help the commenting user to understand why his comments are being downvoted. Examples of nuanced downvote reasons may include:
Possibly ... 1. Non-sequitur 2. Racist/Bigotted/Sexist 3. Gratuitous Profanity ... etc
If we really want to get clinical about this, we can simply use this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
This of course is only for the downvote.
I personally would be interested in seeing whether, over time, my comments (and therefore my thinking) have been victim to certain patterns of thinking that I haven't noticed in myself.