We already have upvoting/downvoting of comments. Why do we need to moderate each and every comment? A non-popular post will have no comments at all as all will be pending and no 1000+ karma users to endorse the comments. :(
Or, if the purpose is to have high karma users function as semi-moderators, why not just keep the upvote/downvote system but make a comment's precedence a function of weighted upvotes based on the karma of those voters? I guess that still wouldn't prevent a very deep off-topic tangent off of an ancestor post that's high up on the page, but it seems like a simpler and safer solution with much less potential downside, and there are always specific solutions to the above problem such as collapsable threads.
