[1] Which I'm guilty of posting every time there's a front end dev topic. :)
There's actually some really good content in incredibly popular threads but it's nearly always overwhelmed by nonsense replies to the first comment.
I guess some people that, but I challenge anyone to close every top level reply in a very popular article and see exactly how many are at the top. Basically the same everytime. It's like a virus.
Am a regular in r/space and most things aren't that popular but some things randomly blow up. There was one thread with well over 1000 comments and right down the bottom, Only 4 hours after the original post was a JPL employee, who was working on object in the story, it was highly detailed, incredibly informative, well-written, and with all the nitty-gritty downsides and shortcomings of engineering work. I'm guessing very few saw what that person wrote compared to 400 puns at the top. It's shameful.
No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
I like it. You can make a joke, but if it's bad, you end up paying for it.
I think the problem OP alludes to still exists on HN. While the replies are sorted (partially) based on their score, they're displayed fully expanded. That means a mid-quality comment with 200 points that has so much upvotes because it wasn't bad and was first, will have all of its hundred child comments displayed above the second-best top-level comment. If the discussions under the first comment explode for some reason, there's a good chance a lot of people won't see the second top-level one.
Possible improvement, at a cost of increased JavaScriptitis - auto-collapse child comments under top-level ones, but in a more prominent way than it's done now, so that people would usually be inclined to browse them. And for the love of people in need of CTRL+F-ing for something specific, provide an "expand all" button at the top.
To quote John Scalzi "the failure state of clever is asshole"
-1 undesired, 0 off-topic / irrelevant, +1 on-topic, +2 informative en +3 spotlight
Works quite well, AFAIK
Edit: this is their FAQ on moderation: https://tweakers.net/info/faq/karma/#tab:1-2
Discussions are more mature here anyway.
Although Tweakers used to have a moderation system akin to Slashdot back then funny comments (or "funny") comments were much more allowed. I'd say funny without intellectual basis or cleverness is not acceptable anymore. I suppose it still is on Slashdot and Reddit.
Hiw does lobste.rs deal with this?
Second, the same model used for HN threads should be applied to comments - not just karma, but a combination of recency and karma. Right now we are demotivated to post on 1st level of existing threads exactly because of karma accumulation for top level posts. Hence, my comment is here :)
We're working on a relevant product for communities so if you're also interested in this problem, let me know.