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If you actually look at how forums scale up and maintain semi-decent discourse, having extremely highly weighted downvotes/flagging is one of the most effective tools (if you don't want all controversial topics killed, you can do what HN does and have mods manually rescue flagged items at their discretion; of course you can do the opposite and have mods try to chase down every bad comment and discussion, but that's harder to scale).

Discourse makes exactly the wrong choice in quite a few ways.