HN Idea
To my mind the logical extension of this would be prioritizing comments that get more upvotes than responses. Those that fall below the threshhold would be sorted lower or default collapsed.
One cool thing about this is it could be a per-user setting, giving users a chance to explore how it would shift the conversation.
I suppose the way to evaluate this proposal would be to query messages from the last day that have 2x more comments than upvotes (for example) and observing their quality.
The second-order effect of this (server side) could be that suppose an article has 100 likes, and 100 comments, but 99 of those are sub-comments are arguing over a egregious 1-comment on the article itself. This 1-comment could be default-collapsed and the article could be treated as 100 likes, 0-comments. This would have the effect of deincentivizing irrelevant hot-button tangents themselves without killing the pieces of the discussion that are more fruitful. This evaluation would work from conversational leaf up to trunk, as soon as a score falls below threshhold that branch is "pruned" from the score.