One category where this doesn't work: I modded down dozens of basically identical "Congratulations!" comments in a popular thread a few months ago -- telling everyone that being the nth identical comment doesn't sound fun.

You know, more than a place to exchange interesting information, we are a community, and having that community congratulate a team for their success has value.

While I agree with you, there will always be people who really just don't want to see a wall of "Congratulations" after someones success-story (or whatnot).

I personally don't mind it, and think it's nice (it certainly feels nice when things like that happen to me), but I can see how someone would not want to see it in the discussion thread they're reading.

"Yes, good job. Enough people have made it clear that the community is happy for this person, yet more people keep doing it"

I would think that as a general rule (especially in congratulatory posts), the upmods from the community would outweigh the downmods.

So why not use email?

If some aspect of being a community (at least in your conception of it) hinders the exchange of interesting information, then maybe it's not worth having.

I don't know what to think of this... there's two potential problems:

First, how do you distinguish the first "Congratulations" from the redundant 14th one? If you downmod everyone then you're penalizing some innocents.

Second, if so many people do the same thing consistently and you're about the only one who seems annoyed by that behavior maybe you should reconsider your reaction? Maybe it was a more "light-earthed" thread so people were less strict about redundance.

I don't think it adds any information. Nobody ever read even the first congratulations post and said "Oh! That's interesting!"

Second, if so many people do the same thing consistently and you're about the only one who seems annoyed by that behavior maybe you should reconsider your reaction? Maybe it was a more "light-earthed" thread so people were less strict about redundance.

Another commenter has mentioned doing the same thing in the same thread.

Labeling such comments as dupes should be fine...

Not sure what you mean, how do you do that?

edit: You mean the flagging option? That's for dead obvious spam and trolling I think...

I mean if you downvote someone for saying congrats for the 46th time, as per GGP's post, you can just put "dupe" in the explanation, if such a system were implemented.

Or maybe have a checkbutton "dupe" instead of just downmodding it.