The issue with voting based forums is they tend to cater to low quality mass appeal comments.

More often than not an informative comment, while maybe not being downvoted, won't be the top comment. Instead, you'll see really low effort "zingers" which make it to the top. Those are further piled on with a flood of comments trying to one up each other.

So, you end up often needing really strict moderation to curtail this problem.

Chrono ordering suffers the same issue, somewhat, though it doesn't have the pile on problem (not to the same extent).

pun chain!

Take my upvote!

Here's gold for you good sir, hearty lols!

To be fair, I do get a good chuckle out of some of the pun chains...

You can hide the whole subtree with one click though.

It's a trade-off.

The Reddit/HN format makes everything time sensitive. If the post falls off the front-page, nobody will even see your comment, the discussion immediately dies. It's completely unfit for longer form discussion over time.

Sometimes you want a forum for discussion, not just a comments section of highlight reel one-liners.

Is there an algorithm that would facilitate discussion though? Regardless of time sensitivity?

Disagree entirely. Trading chronological sort for whatever drives the most ad impressions and engagements is responsible for the destruction of otherwise decent services.

This boils down to the community you are a part of.

One of the games I like to play has its own forums and they are still the best source of info compared to reddit. Discussions are surprisingly readable, though that may have something to do with the older target audience.

I agree, I can't stand them. That's why I won't use arstechnica comment section. I might look at the first few. I much prefer reddit and hackernews style

But that allows for discussion bubbles to form in this case. Contrarian views are downvoted to oblivion. Not much of an issue in HN, as it is in reddit.

You can add like buttons to posts with out it effecting the time ordering and absorb a bunch of me too comments that way.

Another solution to this is discussion wikis.