And much more likely any good comments that are not put in the first hour will never get the points that they deserve. Someone says something witty and gets 192 points. Two days later someone writes something very informative, but there are very few viewers after that so they get only 5 points. It would be foolish to think that an algorithm could compensate. Slashdot has this very problem years ago and solved it in a very good way. This reddit system of many points only works for when there is very small users, but does not scale.
- When people with long enough attention spans are invested in the conversation they will read through many of the comments. In many cases if you come into a conversation late you will be posting a reply because it is less likely you are coming in with a new angle. If you are posting a reply it is more likely others will see your comment because it will be visible on their threads page.
-I think the example you gave is a very rare case (I hope.) Unfortunately part of commenting right now is timing, which I do not have a problem with. If you post something informative two days into the conversation it will not have the same exposure, although depending on the conversation it will not appear far below the fold.
-I do see your point and I think it would be great if good comments that come late have more visibility. None or all of the following might help:
1) Delete comments and their replies once they reach a certain negative threshold (-5 for example.) Of course this gives downmodding a whole new meaning but maybe that is a good thing. This would make the comments section more readable and keep the conversation more civil and/or focused.
2) Highlight comments that were posted in the past 8 hours and have reached some karma threshold in yellow. This is a sort of "recent hot shots" feature. This way when an HN reader scans the page they can see what new comments are receiving upvotes more easily.
3) Give recent votes more weight then past votes. This means that a karma point awarded now means more than a karma point awarded an hour ago. Maybe the algorithm HN uses already does this- I am not sure.
I don't think pushing newer comments with fewer points up is a good idea because that changes the power up upvoting too drastically. Perhaps some anchor tags at the top of the comments section leading to the hottest new comments?
So I started writing a reply that got longer and longer and I am going to turn it into a blog entry. Would you be willing to review it before I publish it?
