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It makes it more difficult for me to quickly scan the most "insightful" comments when determining whether or not to read the article.

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I think the system is designed such that the comments with the most upvotes tend to drift to the top over time.

So, if there is some correlation between the most "insightful" comments and those with the most upvotes, you should see them near the top (eventually, anyway).

The problem I see with this is that upvote distribution across comments isn't linear. Just because you are at the 1/2 way mark doesn't, in any way, mean that the comment can be considered middle ground. A thread with 100 top-level comments might only have 2 or 3 which the community considered insightful. In which case, the 4th comment isn't really any better then the last (it might be a difference of 1 or 2 votes).

Maybe a way to indicate that a certain branch represents X% of all votes? Dunno, stupid idea probably.

Totally agree. It's much harder to pick out the best subthreads of a large discussion. As topics are getting large numbers of comments more quickly now, this is exactly the wrong direction to move in.

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