Kudos to you for responding exactly as I asked! That is rare to begin with, and even more so when I'm being irritable. Big respect.

I can see how using the word "good" was confusing, but I just meant the opposite of "comments that were unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or otherwise broke the site guidelines". It just boils down to: what fits the guidelines or not.

> Wondering how does one tell what is ‘good’ in your mind

Since you can't read my mind (at least I assume you can't, and if you could you wouldn't have this question), that's not doable. What you can do is assess things according to your own reading of the site guidelines. If you assimilate https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and evaluate comments based on that and not just on what you like/dislike, then I imagine you won't end up too far from where the mods are, because that's what we're also trying to do.

I'm sure there will always be individual cases where we disagree—even tomhow and I disagree on individual cases—but they should be a minority.

If there are specific cases where you think we got it wrong, I'd be interested to see links, and we're always willing to hear a contrary argument.