[EuanReid]

Obviously tone is hard in text, and it's worse in multilingual teams. What's been very effective for my current team is adding explicit context as a comment prefix with standardised terms: - Nit for "it doesn't actually matter" - Suggestion for "this approach might be better, what do you think?" - Question for "help me understand this" - Requested Change for "this is actually a blocker"

We include this expectation in our working agreement, stick to it rigorously for reviews where reviewer and reviewee haven't established a strong rapport yet, and use it as appropriate beyond that. So far we've had no confusion about tone in reviews.