[alextgordon]

The comment system on HN discourages discussion of the article, because threads cannot be collapsed and so there is only space for 2 or 3 top-level comments to get much attention.

The top comment is often a poor quality one, expressing some controversial view that gets replies, starving the lower top-level comments of upvotes, and cementing its place at the top.

It would be better to collapse replies to all top-level comments, and allow people to expand the replies to the comments they find interesting.

[rory096]

FYI (and obviously it doesn't help with the systemic problem), a Chrome extension to collapse HN comments was posted a few weeks ago.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213479

[pavel_lishin]

What about randomizing comment order for the first N minutes of a submission's life?

Although I do agree that built-in comment collapse functionality would be great; I'm using a Chrome extension right now.

[dave2000]

I'm a fan of experimenting with voting systems, and as this never happens, i'm always disappointed. I think it would be great if the order of comments was always random and scores were never shown (I don't care what people think of other people's comments; how can an opinion have a score? the very idea is preposterous). It would encourage people reading more comments, and not being either fearful of losing points or posting comments just to get a higher score.

[grrowl]

Worth noting, the score is intended to be an objective measure of correctness — well sourced, clear, and reasonable comments aught to add to the score, rudeness, questionable sourcing/factualness should not. Ideally.

[ethbro]

The problem is, given the current strict comment ordering system & the fact that many (myself included) read comments top to bottom, a 15 in the top position for two hours may in fact be equal to a 3 that's farther below.

I hadn't thought about it when I started writing this, but I'd be curious what comment ordering results a points/time value function would produce. Although a fuzzy random ordering would still be needed to ensure that lower comments got enough viability. So maybe points/time/position-at-vote-time

PS: That said, collapsing comments to promote more equality between highly rated level 1 comments would be an excellent idea.

[elementalest]

I had never thought there might be an extension for collapsing comments...

You have just saved me so much scrolling :D

[DanBC]

Just checking: do you downvote those poor quality top level comments? Does anyone?

[samstave]

I actually never downvote anyone on HN and I seldom upvote anything at all.

[thedaemon]

I've actually never seen a down vote button anywhere on Hacker News. Down voting is a lie!

[svensken]

Only users with enough karma can see downvote buttons. I'm not there yet, either.

[DanBC]

I don't normally ask about downvotes, but I'd be interested to know why this post is getting downvoted.