[alextgordon]

The comment system on HN discourages discussion of the article, because threads cannot be collapsed and so there is only space for 2 or 3 top-level comments to get much attention.

The top comment is often a poor quality one, expressing some controversial view that gets replies, starving the lower top-level comments of upvotes, and cementing its place at the top.

It would be better to collapse replies to all top-level comments, and allow people to expand the replies to the comments they find interesting.

[rory096]

FYI (and obviously it doesn't help with the systemic problem), a Chrome extension to collapse HN comments was posted a few weeks ago.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11213479

[pavel_lishin]

What about randomizing comment order for the first N minutes of a submission's life?

Although I do agree that built-in comment collapse functionality would be great; I'm using a Chrome extension right now.

[dave2000]

I'm a fan of experimenting with voting systems, and as this never happens, i'm always disappointed. I think it would be great if the order of comments was always random and scores were never shown (I don't care what people think of other people's comments; how can an opinion have a score? the very idea is preposterous). It would encourage people reading more comments, and not being either fearful of losing points or posting comments just to get a higher score.

[elementalest]

I had never thought there might be an extension for collapsing comments...

You have just saved me so much scrolling :D

[DanBC]

Just checking: do you downvote those poor quality top level comments? Does anyone?

[samstave]

I actually never downvote anyone on HN and I seldom upvote anything at all.

[DanBC]

I don't normally ask about downvotes, but I'd be interested to know why this post is getting downvoted.