A potentially small change, since there's a lot of space on the page where you reply. People tend to adjust behavior from small nudges - could adding a summary of the rules/hn guidelines on the reply page help avoid some less useful comments?
This could go after the reply button, before it, before the comment box even. Or, to get fancy, positioned based on karma (a little more in the way when it's low, more out of the way as it climbs).
No functional change.
I've found myself delete a lot of less useful comments when I stop and say "is this really helpful? Or am I trying to 'win' a discussion".
Quite possibly, though I wouldn't be so sure. Even small changes may be useful (if there's a chain reaction as it were) to stop things escalating either so much or so quickly, even if it's mostly ignored.
I don't have any info on whether it's mostly new accounts or randomly anyone that is likely to post rule breaking stuff so I'm aware I'm guessing on a lot of this.
Being able to turn it on for a particular thing makes sense (e.g. any political story) - my first thought on top of your suggestions is
* Show if under X karma
* Show if discussion has more than N flagged comments
Things seem to work pretty well here, hopefully there's some tweaks that don't change that but lower the burden for you and others.
This could go after the reply button, before it, before the comment box even. Or, to get fancy, positioned based on karma (a little more in the way when it's low, more out of the way as it climbs).
No functional change.
I've found myself delete a lot of less useful comments when I stop and say "is this really helpful? Or am I trying to 'win' a discussion".