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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

You have just saved me so much scrolling :D

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