Whats the core problem you're trying to solve here?
I certainly welcome someone playing with different algorithms to see how they affect ranking.
[1] Dataset: https://osf.io/bnysw/
[2] Exploratory analyses: https://github.com/social-protocols/hacker-news-data
It promotes groupthink and encourages users to just repeat mainstream opinions.
“showdead” is a feature if you have enough karma and it’s usually easy to see why something is dead.
Controversial arguments made well, or at least to the best of your ability that fall within the guidelines can and do get upvoted. A lot of the dead comments I see are really just ad hominem attacks or near enough to it.
The core problem we are teying to solve is that the community sometimes misses out on the opportunity to discuss content that many people would find valuable and that would engender quality discussion.