Hacker News Reader

I'd guess that a big part of the quality control here comes from efforts of the moderators, so I don't think that replicating the ranking system would replicate the quality of discourse.

It'd only work if you keep the quality of the people commenting the same or better. There's nothing really unique about the way HN works, there's just smarter people here, on average, than in your typical Youtube comment thread.

Much of the apparent quality is the prohibition of topics that will attract controversy _regardless of their importance_ and regardless of the authenticity of the commenters who spam nonsense on it.

For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/forgers-use-fak...