Collapsed comments?

I frequently discuss things on Tweakers.net, a Dutch tech website, which has a fairly unusual but pretty cool comment vote system (that I think this place should consider using, at least for comments!). Here is the faq section in Dutch (if you click on 'moderatiesysteem' at the top), but basically what it comes down to is that you can vote with a certain amount, depending on what you think a comment adds to the discussion, which is pretty much what we're going for here. Here's a rough translation/summary of what it does:

• +3: spotlight; an essential addition to the discussion, something that should've been added in the news article, discussion, whatever. Think of things like background info missing from the article written, or source articles potentially linked. Things like "well this guy lobbying for article 13 was paid $20m by Sony in 2010 for lobbying" or whatever; well-sourced expert knowledge that helps you understand stuff.
• +2: Informative; a very useful addition to the discussion, something that sticks out. They mention stuff like information that's available to experts of the field, but wouldn't be known to laypeople.
• +1: On-topic; general comments/additions (honestly the vast majority of comments fall into this category). It's not offensive or bad, but it's just there.
• 0: Off-topic/irrelevant; pretty obvious, it doesn't add anything, is off-topic, not new info (e.g. pretty much a duplicate comment), etc. The way Tweakers does it this is the standard score for all new comments (since you don't know if it'll be positive or negative)
• -1: Unwanted; trolls, flame, bad faith arguments, yelling; basically most stuff that you'd use the tag/flag feature for now.
• -2 (not shown); certain levels of mods have the power to use this, it hides the comment (and is used for legal reasons or when it's against the rules—i suppose so that they can still keep it in the DB when they link it to relevant people or something??)

I don't know if that helps, but it makes the tag feature only applicable if someone scores something a 0 or -1, I suppose. And I think since points/karma/whatever isn't counted here it might make an interesting alternative for comments.

fwiw they have some system of ranking posts based on this, where comment threads with +3 will go to the top, followed by high-average discussions (like a thread with a bunch of +2's). Furthermore they have a toggle in the discussions at the top that allow you to see a certain score and up. -1 is collapsed by default, but that way you can click +3 and everything except +3 comments are collapsed for that comment section.

I'm slightly curious what your ideas are for the other tags. Like if there are so many flames what are you thinking the outcome for that would be? Also is there a doc related to when certain tags are expected to be used. Guidelines I guess. If not are there plans to make something like that?

Not for good. If we spot misapplied tag actions we can report that to Deimos who can undo them and then warn/punish those who misapplied them.

Aren't you like 3-4 moderators (or is it only Deimos) for the whole site? Can you really moderate the activity of hundreds of active users and the corresponding comments?

Can't it be based on a ratio of score to noise tags? Maybe something like:

def collapse_from_tags(self, viewer: Optional[User]) -> None:
    """Collapse comments based on how they've been tagged."""
    for comment in self.comments:
        # never affect the viewer's own comments
        if viewer and comment.user == viewer:
            continue

        if comment.tag_counts["noise"] / max(comment.num_votes, 1) > 0.25:
            comment.collapsed_state = "full"

I think noise needs to be treated more harshly, in some ways quite a lot like delete. If it's noise (or whisper) it shouldn't trigger unviewed notifications & shouldn't get comment highlighted. Maybe worth having generic code for things which are there but in some ways not fully there?? Like Delete, Noise & Whisper, that could then be per-user optionally applied to other stuff so I could have a setting to opt-out of highlighting of humour comments I wanted?

I've removed the mentions, not sure if that recalls the notifications after-the-fact.

It should. I'll take a quick look to confirm that it removed them, because that would be a bug if editing out (or in) username mentions doesn't interact with the mention notifications. (Edit: yes, confirmed it's working)

And it's fine, but like I said: it's an alpha site where you're obviously aware that I'm currently working on collapsing-related changes. If something seems out of whack it's probably more reasonable to assume that it's a bug than go immediately to "legitimately concerned about this turn of events" levels of framing about it.