Where I have more trouble with is with comment-ranking within an article. The interface makes it hard to understand conversational flow, and of course that flow changes over time according to whatever the algorithm does. This makes it very hard to catch up later on an article’s comments and get a view of what has changed since my last view. Maybe there is a way to do this via the interface, but if so it’s not obvious.
My biggest complaint related to this is that all threads are dead within 24 hours, which kills a lot of interesting discussion. And commenters have no incentive to reply to dead threads.
This discourages in depth back and forth conversation which I usually find is the most interesting.
TBH, I am not sure if there is a good non-invite-only forum that facilitates that.
In other words, looking at karma won’t tell you whether someone replied to your comments or not. There is nothing on HN to indicate replies unless you dig into your comments history. There nay be other sites or browser extensions that could help on getting notified.
I don’t know the status of it, but it seemed like an interesting idea.