I understand your reluctance, and I'd love to see strong editorializing on some site on the internet. It seems, though, as any site becomes reasonably large the editorializing disappears and is replaced with algorithms.

Has the idea I proposed (essentially the Netflix recommendation system) ever been tried before for a comment/story posting system? If not, why not go the whole hog and try it? Let's see if it works.

That's why I'd propose a forking. Create mini-HN communities and slowly thin out the userbase. That's if the site ever gets too big. It's perfectly manageable right now for me - I don't think new systems are necessary.

Ask yourself: has content recommendation ever worked? I've never seen an "If you liked X you'll like Y" work for any original content. Even for movies/books it's shady at best. Working with something as complex as comments is too tricky to make worse. How do you measure tone versus stance versus wit versus writing style? They're all elements of what I look for in comments.

Just because it's never worked as a movie recommendation system doesn't discourage me from trying it for a commenting system! (Especially since the idea is so trivial, and ought to be easy to implement).

Well, how would you display these recommended comments? How would you analyze the content of comments to determine recommendation? If I downvote every anti-Linux comment I see, does the algorithm stop showing me anti-Linux comments? Because that detracts from the debate going on. What if I downvote based on poor spellings - or even more, if I downvote solely based on how well the writer forms sentences? How will the algorithm figure that out?

The easiest solutions are the simplest ones. Complexity only serves a purpose when there's a simple cause behind the complexity. Adding algorithms when there's no need will only make things less reliable.