More types of flagging? 
breck: > Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore.Could the community help monitor the general tone of the site? It seems like keeping things civil is a hard task for you and the top users.Could there be an automatic survey sent out each week or month to a random sample set of users to measure their overall satisfaction with the site and tone? It could even be just one question ("How would you rate the discourse on HN lately? Highly Civil, Civil, or Uncivil").That way there would be a good objective gauge to see trends in tone and to monitor the impact of any changes like flags.As the site continues to grow it gets more challenging to preserve the level of discussion. Having some long term measure of that might be helpful and make it easier to know when a new feature needs to be implemented.