Most high-scoring comments are long, not short. Of the top 30 recent comments, only 3 are one sentence or less.

Long comments take a much larger investment. If you consider karma/word, short comments are the way to go.

That would be true if you were shooting for total karma, but for the orange name thing it's the average that matters. If you want a high average, it's better to have a small number of highly rated posts than a large number of ok ones.

The number now is (karma - 3.5)/word. So the optimal length is probably not "as little as possible", but perhaps a two-sentence paragraph.

10% is a fairly significant number, when all is said and done. Meaning, 10% of all highlighted users could essentially just be good at making witty one line comments.

That being said, 90%/10% is a fantastic signal to noise ratio when compared to the rest of the internet. :-)

Right, but it shouldn't matter what the makeup of the top 30 comments are. In this case, it only matters that someone can net a 3.5 average over their last 50. Which maybe isn't statistically probable for users who happen to write the occasional popular but low-value comment.

Either way, I would argue that while the upper bound on exacerbation isn't high, the same is true of any potential mitigation. At the end of the day, I don't see the major problems subsiding much, and it's not just one-line zingers, but, say, uncharitable comments that piss people off and provoke deep threads of people talking past each other. There's nothing more unpleasant in online communities than being the recipient of an uncharitable reply, and feeling compelled to defend oneself. (I say this being guilty of uncharitable replies myself.)

See, I think the one-liner blight could be headed off by auto-collapsing threads that are long and mostly really short replies unless the karma of the parent comment is above a certain threshold.

Collapsable threads might be a good idea, but I'd prefer having the system make its values explicit via descriptors for comments (think Slashdot or Plastic). My top two would be "insightful" and "uncharitable". The former encourages what's best about this community, the latter strongly discourages what's worst. A lot of deep and pointless threads are caused by commenters reacting to their own hasty interpretations of what someone said rather than even-handedly responding to them.

Also, no "Funny".

collapsible comment threads would be very much appreciated.

I've seen that work really well on a couple sites. I played a certain MMO for a while (I know, I know) and the overall maturity level was, shall we say...low. Anyway, one of the popular database sites implemented that feature for it's threaded comments and if you compared the tone of the discourse their to the tone on the regular forums, it was night and day. The trolls simply branched off into threads that where below a certain threshold and were autocollapsed. You could still see the parent thread title inline and click through to the full thread if you wanted, but the signal to noise was much improved.

word. i'm one of the standard slashdot->proggit->hn users. slashdot's comment system rocks (ui and concept). it's a very strange worse-is-better effect that reddit and hn have both meant losing features in exchange for the advantages of being part of smaller communities.

edit: i was going to whip out a greasemonkey script to do just that, but then i saw that the comments are just one big table...ug. i was hoping for nested div's. eit.