Hi David, we did consider all of these possibilities when building our system! In fact, we assume people will try to game it; that's why we have a lot going on behind the scenes algorithmically. The commenter-facing part of the app is very straightforward, but there are a lot of checks and balances on the backend to prevent coordinated attacks and also to keep comments sections from becoming echo chambers. Banning insulting words isn't enough, unfortunately; people will always be smarter than word filters, even if the algorithm tries to take context into account. We do have a backup algorithm for low-volume situations that basically does this (plus a few other things), but it's not as effective as human reviewers.

I hear you on the "more replies" button; I don't think we'll remove it entirely, but I agree it's appearing too often, after too few comments. We'll be pushing updates very soon!

Labels: moderation: safe