I would prefer to do the opposite, where everything is displayed in chronological order (with an option to display by threads or not; even if not you can still find what each one is a reply to) regardless of voting and regardless of who wrote them.
I've been wishing for a News (NNTP) portal for HN. Would solve that as well as making it easier to follow larger threads by allowing you to track read/unread.
I also thought of that too. It would allow what I mentioned and what you mentioned. If you want to hide messages from specific users (or other criteria), then that would also be possible.
magicalhippo|3 days ago
Mostly because I really miss newsgroups though.
zzo38computer|2 days ago