zlacker

It's more boring than you'd expect. The comments that get most heavily upvoted tend to be either (1) indignantly rhetorical, or (2) generic. Mostly what we do is downweight those when they're at the top of the thread. The "algorithm" is about as simple as:

(1) if the top comment is indignantly rhetorical or generic, downweight it; otherwise go look at another thread;

(2) refresh the page;

(3) goto (1).

If I'm feeling diligent, I might do this for the top few subthreads, but that's about it.

This simple intervention turns out to be the highest-leverage thing we've figured out in recent years:

ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20highest%20leverage&sort=byDate&type=comment

>>dang+(OP)
If it's truly a service that's being provided by your superdownvotes, I wonder what would happen if you let people opt out of it.

I would rather see the highest voted comments, and I'm pretty happy to just scroll down myself if I find the top comment to be useless.