> its impossible to tell which comment gets the highest vote. Which negates the reason for asking the crowd in the first place.
Wait a couple of days after the last comment you are interested in was posted; the time decay among different replies will be approximately equal, and the one on top is the highest, but
> I care because I want to know the right answer.
> Its kind of like asking your friends if you should buy A or B. If all of them say A, you get a good handle on the reasons to buy A.
The reasons are in the text, not in the vote, and you have to read them in order to appreciate if this is relevant to you or not. No way around it.
> This sort of question works fine if commenters just say A or B in the first comments. But what if someone replies to that and says "What about C, that's an even better alternative." And then everyone agrees C is better. But the current system doesn't allow us to see that accurately, so I'm asking if it can be turned on for people wanting to ask questions that way.
Come on.... What if that "what about C reply" was posted 5 days later, when no one who posted A or B was still looking? does the fact that it didn't get much upvotes make it any less valid?
Also, time of day matters -- at different times of the day, the answer statistics are dominated by people in Asia/Australia, people in Europe, and people in the US, etc, and they might have wildly different circumstances. You have to wait a couple of days for the dust to settle and everyone to chime in.
I'm sorry to say that, but your post have convinced me even more that pg did the right thing: There is much, much less information in those numbers than you ascribe. Even the rank is super biased. If you base your view of "what's right" on the number of votes (or even on their rank) rather than the actual content, perhaps HN is not the right place for you.