Yes, this non-linear idea seems very interesting. I have read several discussions on various boards with much hand-wringing about the best way of sorting comments - by time, by votes, by user rep, by some sort of weighted average of the above? Suddenly things get rather complicated as people try to decide how the weights should be balanced. But this idea of showing multiple different feeds side-by-side is very refreshing. Two (or even three?) feeds with different weightings and (and relative sizes!) could provide a better balance than what we are used to.

(As an aside, it would be entertaining to take it to an extreme - seeing the top voted comments also shows you the bottom voted, most controversial also shows least, etc. A sort of anti-echo-chamber measure.)

I think Lesswrong's solution only works because they have a small community, and they have a lot of comment junkies that want to read every new comment. Reddit and HN also have new comment feeds (https://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments/ https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments), but I don't think anyone but bots read them. Granted they could be made more prominent like on Lesswrong.

Many good subreddits are similar to LW in size and might benefit from a similar UI change.

>reddit.com/r/<subreddit>/comments/

Thanks for posting that; I'd never seen it before. As my sister comment said, for smaller subs it could be quite useful for finding active discussions - like on /r/truefilm or something.

People always say "sort Reddit threads by comment age if you want the 4chan experience" and that has some merit - but that only applies once you have chosen a thread to open. A subreddit-wide comment feed gives an idea of which threads are active without relying on the blackbox thread ranking algorithm Reddit provides.

I like the simplicity of this solution, but it might be a good idea to combine it with other relatively simple measures that dampen the "first comment effect," such as randomizing which comments show up at the top, as others have suggested in other threads here.

Can you comment on how comments could benefit from NLP related advances? E.g. detecting entities and using those as entry points into discussion, detecting similar topics discussed in different threads, detecting comments which are low effort and don't add much value. I hate the fact that first/top comment sets the tone for discussion overall and lot of people end up expending energy on that topic alone. People end up discussing something tangential just because the first commenter had "interesting" observation. Also I hate the pun threads which plagues reddit.