no, i've had some comments in the past that "should" be on that list that aren't.

in fact, i see some comments in my thread history that should be on this list that aren't.

edit: i don't see anything older than 9 days. maybe a 10 day or 2 week maximum?

While I do share your sentiment fearing that the community will change, I don't think that the karma totals are really a good gauge of content/comment quality on HN. Just because more people are here to upvote does not mean the comment is of lesser quality than before (the opposite is also true...)

A quick fix to this could be a sort of weighted comment score. Maybe the karma points / by the number of karma points added that day to give an idea of scale in comparison to the overall size of community. I'm sure others could come up with something more precise, but it's a start.

I agree, but I've had comments that were in the eighties and I think one topped a hundred, and they don't show up here.

By the same token, it seems to me that the ratio "story upvotes"/"number of comments" has gone higher and higher recently.

I'm not sure what it says about HN though. I might not necessarily be a bad thing actually. I'm not really for having a flood of comments on all the stories.

That's something slashdot got right- capping comment scores. There's really no need to give something 128 upvotes, it's just a pileon.