Quality is discourse, not peanut gallery, vacuum sucking commentary that builds on puns, memes, insults and karma whoring.
Inflammatory comments often devolve into nothing. No insights, no evocative call to action. However, constructive assertions backed by reason are not inflammatory and equally capable of evocative statements that can be challenged.
What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment.
Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people?
This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.