I'm always surprised Slashdot-style tagged voting isn't more widespread, and curious what would happen if more communities tried it.
One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).
One can imagine it reducing tensions by allowing different subpopulations to have different views of the same conversation - e.g. some people might want to filter "Funny", others wouldn't mind. If the tags are an open set, you might see other use cases evolving, like being able to jump to the highest-ranked "TL;DR"-tagged comment, or deprioritizing comments tagged "Complaint about article formatting" (much as I tend to agree with those, they do seem to be contentious).