For cases like this where the article is fluff but the comments are substantial, we have a way of killing articles that doesn't turn off new comments, and that is what I used.
It's another way of "liking" the comment or voting it up. The user is essentially saying "I agree with this".
People sometimes flag such comments because:
1) The upvote mechanism was created for 'this' purpose.
2) These types of comments don't necessarily add much value to the threads and the community at large is very protective and self-governing in terms of maintaining the integrity of the site.
... Personally, I don't care. I'm sure I've 'this'd comments before in one form or another.
Semantics aside, this is the reason FB will own the search/discovery space in the future. That's not just a troll comment, that's fact.
FB is amassing a huge database of well organized & socially relevant online documents that other companies are going to have a hard time even coming close to. It's like PageRank on steroids.
FB may be amassing that database today, but the OpenGraph metadata is publicly available to anyone who crawls that same page no? So what's stopping anyone else who crawls the web from using that same data (G+)?
Brilliant comment. Couldn't agree more that the culture of "us against them" that has been prevalent since 9/11 has played a huge part in propagating hate and laying the foundations for a bring "them" down culture.
