I was thinking about a similar scoring strategy for comments as is applied to articles. Articles which generate more comments than upvotes are deprioritized. Perhaps comments that garner more comments than upvotes could similarly be deprioritized (not unlike reddit penalizing controversial opinions [those with both upvotes & downvotes] )

I'm envisioning a use-case for this would be when say, an article briefly touching on tech interviewing (or with a title about tech-interviewing) is posted, and immediately the top-comment changes the subject to "Boy tech interwiews really grind my gears!" Suddenly everyone wants to vent and the thread is overwhelmed.

One natural reason for this penalty is that a highly-ranked comment brings along all the comments that ride along with it to the top. The most extreme form is when the entire comment page is a single comment-thread.

Alternatively, a flexible proposal is to allow users to choose their sort preference, like they can on reddit.

We've seen the outcome of this. It's the turbo echo chamber that people here bemoan all the time.

I wish there were an effective way to distinguish between upvotes-as-agreement (or amusement) and upvotes as distinguishing between signal and noise. That seems to be one of the biggest problems in large communities that rely on it. (besides, like, clearly offensive and moderateable behavior)

So, I don't think there is one. At least not one compatible with democratic-like systems.

The fundamental issue here, at least to me, is that the upvote is an "I like this" signal. The instinctive use of an upvote is to see more of what you like. Turns out that what people like is what people already agree with.

Unless you build a strong culture that values the signal/noise ratio (remember that early reddit had much more of "UPVOTE IS NOT A DISAGREE" culture, hivemindy as it was), you're not getting your desired outcome. Worse, if you let in the mobs, it doesn't matter how principled your initial group was as they'll soon be overwhelmed by the crowd. The historical record there is obvious.

I think the only way about this is gate-keeping. You want that culture, you'd better enforce it. If you somehow start with a seed userbase of principled people, you only allow people voting rights once they meet whatever gatekeeping criteria that you've set. I don't think this is that scalable, but smaller more tightly knit communities might be a plus to some.

Actually, I'm wondering if something like this might have a niche out there somewhere. We know that Digg in the old days had the superuser group, and the strength of reddit was it's specialized subreddits. Would a system crossing specialized subs with hierarchical user privileges (viewer/voter/voter_with_grant_privs) be something that could work?

The fundamental problem is that people will treat upvotes as agreement, even in communities who set out to make sure this isn't the case. I stopped posting at tildes.net recently, which has this exact problem with upvotes in spite of this being a cultural pain point that caused so many of tildes' users to leave reddit.

In a way it's sort of evolutionary. People attempt to propagate their own ideas or similar, and remove ideas they dislike from the meme pool, via voting systems.

A slightly modified version would be to delay on post depth (assuming less depth = more delay)

If you take it to the extreme, a youtube video being posted and everyone having to wait 5 minutes to comment, there is enough people that will see it at 4.30 to have a visceral reaction and post inflammatory comments. You can extend that down to each level of comments.

HN already does this to some degree, the "reply" button is hidden as you get deeper into a tree of comments.

You can, of course, click on the timestamp and see it anyway, so it's more of a speedbump for folks who don't know all of the details of how the forum works than a true delay, though.