HN Idea
One of the core things about HN sorting is penalizing articles that generate more comments than upvotes. IMO this is wildly successful.<p>To my mind the logical extension of this would be prioritizing comments that get more upvotes than responses. Those that fall below the threshhold would be sorted lower or default collapsed.<p>One cool thing about this is it could be a per-user setting, giving users a chance to explore how it would shift the conversation.<p>I suppose the way to evaluate this proposal would be to query messages from the last day that have 2x more comments than upvotes (for example) and observing their quality.<p>The second-order effect of this (server side) could be that suppose an article has 100 likes, and 100 comments, but 99 of those are sub-comments are arguing over a egregious 1-comment on the article itself. This 1-comment could be default-collapsed and the article could be treated as 100 likes, 0-comments. This would have the effect of deincentivizing irrelevant hot-button tangents themselves without killing the pieces of the discussion that are more fruitful. This evaluation would work from conversational leaf up to trunk, as soon as a score falls below threshhold that branch is &quot;pruned&quot; from the score.