Is flagging a bunch of "thanks" comments OK?

Question

I made a SEDE query to find all the comments that contained thank, the @ character, weren't saying yes/no to something, and were less than 20 characters. The query is here. It returned over 1400 results. That's quite a few supposedly-unneeded thanks comments. I'd like to go through each one (manually, not automatically) and flag the ones that I believe are No Longer Needed. I don't have an exact number, but I think that will be a large number of comments. Is it OK if I go ahead and do that, or should I not?

I would be finding them via SEDE, not manually, so I'm not sure if there is a rule about that (simaler to serial-voting, but with a query instead of a user). Also, I believe that (some?) comments don't go into a queue when flagged, like if they have thanks in them. But I wouldn't want to cause problems by putting hundreds of comments into a queue, and then get flag-banned as a result. So, is flagging a bunch of these comments acceptable, or even good, assuming I believe each one is really No Longer Needed?

Or, if it would be better, I can go through the query results manually, make a list of every comment I think is No Longer Needed, and dump them in a big Meta post, as to not hit the comment flag limit.

Answer 1

There's nothing necessarily wrong with it, but if it's overloading the moderators you might be asked to slow down.

I've done this several years ago; run queries, find obsolete or unnecessary comments, and flag them. It gets rather boring after a while, but from an objective standpoint the comments usually should be deleted, so flagging is fine.

However. Please take into account site culture; different sites behave differently when it comes to comments. Some sites are strict about no-noise comments, others less so. On Scifi.SE, "thank you" comments are used to identify whether or not a story-identification question has been correctly answered, which affects duplicate closure. Deleting those could cause confusion.

You are limited to at most 100 comment flags a day. That's a drop in a bucket on Stack Overflow, but on smaller sites that can be overwhelming. Take into account the size of the site you're flagging on.

And, of course, if you're asked to stop... stop. This does eat moderator time, and if it's taking up too much effort from the moderators for minimal gain, be mindful that you may be asked to pause.

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But here's a suggestion for something that might be a slightly better use of your time. Run the query, flag a comment... and then go over the rest of the post. Are there other comments that can be removed? Does the question need to be edited? Do the answers need to be edited? Do the images have alt text? Are the tags correct?
Go over the entire post when finding content through queries, not just the one thing you were searching for.

Answer 2

I'm a moderator on a fairly small site and just wanted to echo the idea from Mithical's answer that you should ask these communities whether they want flags for this. We haven't found these comments to be worth the trouble of deleting and they can be beneficial in making the community seem more welcoming. I'm fine with some outsider edits to improve formatting, but I don't feel these sorts of flags for benign comments would be useful for our site.

Answer 3

Most of the "thanks" comments that you are flagging will be instantly killed off by the system and never make it to the moderator dashboard.

There will be very little impact on human moderators based on your SEDE query criteria. You will see most of these flags will make the comment instantly vanish. The Stack Exchange Network has dedicated scripting to assist with the removal of "thanks" comments and the placeholder text on every Stack Exchange community explicitly says not to say "thanks" or "+1". This is because these comments are useless noise to researchers (these are the users that we are ultimately trying to give value to).

As for any comments that are not instantly deleted, my opinion is:

"Don't worry about the donkey (mule/horse), load the cart (wagon)."

If you see something that doesn't belong and/or doesn't benefit researchers, flag it for removal.

If there aren't enough moderators to handle the flag load, the existing moderators can ask for more moderators and/or better tools. That said, I don't think a minor spike in flags is going to greatly disrupt an entire team of moderators. This, after all, is just housekeeping that was waiting to be done.

If certain communities are retaining useless/noisy comments, then they are not only creating unnecessary page bloat. They are teaching their citizens that making noise is tolerated/acceptable. Then when noisy commentors spread their wings and join a new community, they will take their bad habits with them.

We all have a responsibility to groom each other for the betterment of the whole. By minding our patch and guiding users how to ask, answer, and comment, we put Stack Exchange on a positive trajectory. By better "training" users in our own communities, these users become helpful hands when they join new communities. This is a positive butterfly effect.

Finally, if we don't serve up heaps of flags, then how will we find our next @Bhargav (the world's most prolific flag smasher)?

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I just just unearthed an old mJSE post of mine which was posted after I joined a new community and before becoming a moderator there. While it is a little long-winded, it demonstrates the frustration of an experienced Stack Exchange user joining a community and being confused/horrified at the moderator team rejecting absolutely valid comment flags en masse. My question goes pretty far to offer an itemized record of flags which should have been deemed helpful, but were not. My post also serves up nine reasons why we should be trashing noisy comments. Why don't JSE moderators trash unnecessary comments like other SE sites?