Just like with Reddit, there is always some jackass who cannot resist the urge to post threadcrap, as we see in the linked thread.
Sometimes we don’t want a thread of clowns. We want sophisticated intellectuals, not children, to generate an insightful and thought-provoking comments.
So how can the tools be made to accommodate?
comment removal is tyrannical
Lemmy has a blunt Elon-style chainsaw: comment removal. WTF.. can’t we be more intelligent than this? It’s exreme, yet exclusively reserved for the moderator. It serves a good purpose, but it’s not a good way to deal with clowns whose content does not qualify as spam.
Let the clowns have their say, but it should not clutter or detract from articulate chatter.
voting does not work
No, voting is not the fix. It’s shitty at making that separation b/c votes reflect emotion, not articulation. Intelligent discussion is relatively boring to most people and does not trigger emotion, so it gets buried under garbage.
Give me a thread-splitting option
The OP tags comments that don’t have a shred of intelligence (like those in the linked thread). But let’s not censor them. Let the clowns have their fun. Those tagged comments get put into a separate branch, accessible to everyone by clicking on a clown head. The default thread remains unpolluted with trash.
I’m not sure I’m on board with your proposed solution. Perhaps comments are the non-censorship way to combat comments that provide little value. And a thread can contain comments of highly different value can become a thread of high value. And that level of value can vary greatly from user to user reading the thread. And then there’s the case when incredibly stupid satire reveals something profound about a topic that dry analysis just can’t capture or convey.
I understand your preference is to not have to see the trolling. And for you, mods deleting comments or users blocking other users is too heavy handed. But it sounds like your solution would force your preferred paradigm on everyone.
Some people are here for the peanut butter. Some are here for the chocolate. And some appreciate two great tastes that taste great together.
Two problems with this:
Readers don’t have time to pick through garbage, but the OP does (as they get notifications).
Everyone already is forced by a paradigm -- one of a single master with limited time and blunt tools.
The OP is a stakeholder who invested constructively into the thread. If an OP does not value their own investment in time and labor, they would not have to use a platform that empowers them to organise clowns and hecklers into a separate branch of visiblity. The popularity of the idea would be evident in who chooses to post under that paradigm.
In fact, it could be configured on a post-by-post basis. If you create a new post, you could have a tickbox “do you want to have clown control?” If they tick the YES box, the trolls may not even bother with such threads (good!). If they tick the NO box, the OP gets more engagement (but they may not like the result).