This is the same thing I try to do. I'm very bad at flagging/downvoting as much as I should. Most days I'll read 3,000 comments and not downvote a single one. I want to religiously downvote and flag every comment which breaks HN guidelines. Especially jokes which don't add context/perspective.
examples of actual comments in the past 24 hours that I wish I had downvoted:
> 2022 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop! /s
> So... fuzzy logic. Everything old is new again! Again!
> piety contests have consequences
> Top level commend: "in the fullness of time JAX might prove to be more important than either. don't give people fish, teach them how to catch fish and all that..."
> wtf I love crypto now
I'm looking for a more specific example but nearly every day I see an interesting article where there's one long comment chain which is just "textual memes", sort of a Markov-chain of pop culture references for internet nerds. There's no extractable commentary or perspective, but rather the purpose of the comments were for the commenters to have "participated" in their group activity. (Often it's a type of "Hello there, general Kenobi" call-and-response chain)
Some pithy-one liners hold great insight. That's fairly rare but it does happen. Its certainly possible to creatively utilize a one-word reference to a larger topic to contextualize the discussion in a surprising way. But rehashing a cluster of xkcd comics as a form of commentary, for the 10-millionth time, seems to more often just lead to a "circle jerk" of comments. Its easy to ignore, but I fear that by not aggressively downvoting zero-value comments, we abdicate our responsibility as HN's "immune system"[0]. That attracts and grows more culture of low-value comments on HN.
I would love if HN's collective moderation grew to be much stricter than it is now. To be clear - I don't want this to be applied to unpopular views that are constructively written. I just want us to remove low-effort drivel and reflexive (non)-responses.
Also many of my own comments fail my own standards when I review them 24 hours later. I would greatly appreciate it if HN could give me quicker feedback when I post low-value comments, so that I may better raise my quality floor.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7590569