Been doing some reading on the Civil comments system, and it's got a built in Achilles Heel. Five people flag your comment as uncivil, and it's automatically removed from circulation and sent to the site mods themselves to decide if that needs over riding.  The publishers of Civil say that they work hard for their platform not to turn into a base popularity contest, but given that structure, I cannot see how they can avoid that reality.  A small group of committed posters could easily set the tone for the whole site if they were actively filtering and the mods didn't have the manpower to handle the volume of flagged posts for secondary review.

Given the number of perfectly reasonable posts that have vanished, I'd have to say the system is well and truly getting gamed.