People optimizing for this kind of low effort but highly upvoted comment is called “karma whoring” on some places.

The reflective circuitry, which takes in new information, turns it over, and generates an unpredictable response, is much slower and harder to run. I suppose it's a bit like the difference between a sugar hit and eating nutritious food with fiber. The latter makes you feel better in the long run, but when it comes to mass dynamics, the sugar hit wins out every time.

> once a comment becomes established as the top comment in a thread -- and it doesn't take much for that to happen -- it is nearly impossible to dislodge it

Moderators downweight top subthreads that are generic or otherwise lame, and repeat this until the top subthread is no longer lame—if possible. The trouble is that this is an intensive manual process. Most likely the software needs to be adjusted as well.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] This is probably the basis for the generic subthreads which are the bane of this forum: not bad enough to flag, but predictable enough to suffocate.

context: i read the "past" page every day, so often am several hours or over a day behind discourse. interstingly enough this post is still relatively new and was popular enough before midnight utc to show up in today's past page.

i wonder how much positive feedback posts receive if they miss the initial window.

I know HN does something similar, but it is not quite as good as reddit. From observation, specifically the 'penalty', or added performance requirement, of latching on to a top post is too weak. The result is that all HN comment threads consist of only a few top level posts, with subthreads growing off them, because you can easily 'jump the queue' just by commenting to a top comment. This is also what contributes to the idea that it is pointless to make new root level comments after an hour - because almost all the action is in subcomments to top comments.

Edited to add: Reddit soft-hides (collapses) subthreads that are deemed lower importance, which is probably key to make the ranking system work. Anyone interested in a subthread may expand the hidden/collapsed sections, and they may even be upvoted back to uncollapsed state. But by default they don't muscle into the main conversation. HN already has the collapse feature, which could be reused for this. It's just a client-side collapse, also the reddit one (though in huge threads, deeper threads will be loaded on demand).

How?

> the 'penalty', or added performance requirement, of latching on to a top post is too weak

I'm confused by what you mean by 'quality' and 'performance', unless you just mean upvotes.

I think reddit just counts a ratio of upvotes to views (ofc downvotes too). It is possible that users collapsing a comment/subthread also has some weight. Would make sense.

> And, importantly, the quality requirement for the post increases the higher in the total hierarchy it is: root-level post, top-level reply to a top comment, and so on

What I mean by this, is that the more prominent a place a post holds, the better it must 'perform' (per the above definition). Prominence being mostly just how high on the page it is.

considering this along with the comment below in the thread:

>most activity on a thread seems to happen in the first 24 hours of posting it. the discussion tapers off beyond that.

Supports more software experiments to encourage "slower" or longer discourse, and thus reflection.

This is my longtime wish as a user: reading via RSS most conversations are long dead when I get to them. I subscribe to replies on my comments, but since few other people do, it's not that useful. Simply promoting such features might help, as I bet few users are aware of them.

1) my comment actually did capture your attention 2) I did notice it (courtesy of HN Replies)

The current state isn't working too poorly. and sure beats the pants off any other option i know of ;)

So please keep up the awesome work.

And the other problem is that even when it works perfectly, this process as described can only produce non-lameness at best.

I have a suggestion based on something I did at Google 20+ years ago: compute Page Rank on commenters. I did this 24 years ago in the Google Translation Console, which was a (now long-since-retired) public interface for volunteers to translation Google's site content into other languages. Translators would not just input their own translations but also rate the translations submitted by others. Translators whose translations were upvoted more often were deemed more reliable raters, just as links from highly ranked web pages are weighted more highly when computing Page Rank. This successfully prevented any translation spam from ever making it through to the public site (as far as we could tell). It never reached the scale of HN, but it's a lot easier to implement such a thing nowadays too, so I think it might be worth a try.

How do you structure this to avoid that problem? How would the system work for a new account just created to get established?

Just out of curiosity, who would you cite as an example of a lame commenter with tends of thousands of karma points?

Sometimes moderators actively bump down top comments.

It’s probably related to what dang wrote above about the “unholy dynamic” of low-content comments that trigger easy upvotes. I remember myself having written some (frankly) lightweight low-effort snark, see it end up at the top of the comments for a few hours, and then it went mysteriously halfway down the list even though the upvotes didn’t stop.

To be clear, I think it’s a good thing the moderators do this kind of weighting, and the invisibility of comment upvote counts to non-authors is an important feature because it enables this.