Sorry for the meta hijacking, but now that we're here, HN developers: Please penalize comments that jump the queue by responding to the top comment. There are frequently topics with hundreds of comments, where almost all are replies to the first comment, or the first comment of that comment, ad inifinitum.
Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees once they reach a certain depth vs. upvotes.
We regularly detach replies to the top comment that aren't really replies to the top comment. But of course we can't do that in every thread.
> Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees
That doesn't address the "faux replies to top comment" problem unless you auto-fold at depth 1 (i.e. collapse away all replies to every top-level comment) – which feels like too much auto-folding to me.
The way it seems to work is that direct replies to highly rated comments need to 'do more work' to stay unfolded (i.e. it needs to gain a higher amount of upvotes-per-view). This burden is similarly increased the deeper nested comments get, and possibly the more replies already exist to the parent.
It is a deterrence to posting a direct reply to the top comment, since there is a higher chance that the reply gets folded, unless it is high quality.
I like this idea that comments have to earn their keep, in a weighted ratio to how visible a space they are trying to claim.
