> In the two examples above: When you upvote a comment, the computer thinks that the other comments you have read (the blue ones) but did not upvote, are not terribly interesting.
If you upvote a comment as interesting and the not the ones leading up to it, then you are punishing that comment because you're punishing its predecessors in the threaded chain, so it will be less-seen because you upvoted it.
Any other assumptions of which comments are read will probably not end well. Some people may skip to comments to get someone's personal opinion, other people may only read shorter comments.
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It's worth noting that HN has an interesting algorithm that does not exactly sort by comment score. I have a very high average karma, and when I post on a topic, even if the topic already have 60 comments, my comment begins at the top and stays there even if I'm not upvoted. I suspect that the sorting algorithm is doing something like implicitly adding average karma to the karma of each post when determining order. Therefore it doesn't sort by "best", but by "well regarded".
This is good and bad. It's good because if a person who usually makes high quality comments comes along late to the game, their voice will be heard. It's bad because it creates its own rich-get-richer problem.
I think a better solution to the problem is to simply:
1) Hide upvote numbers like HN is already doing[1]
2) Dither the comments between "new" and "well regarded". First comment is the newest, second is the most well regarded, third comment is the next newest, etc. Perhaps randomize which category comes first.
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[1] Of course hiding upvote numbers has its own major problem because sometimes the hard number of "I agree" upvotes is important. When you want to "Ask HN", say, what particular frameworks people can vouch for, you have no real way of evaluating the comment responses in terms of people that agree. Since they aren't even sorted from best to worst, the information you have is somewhat dim. This could be remedied by giving submitters the ability to turn on comment scores for only their thread. (Or the ability for mods to do it)