I'm a fan of experimenting with voting systems, and as this never happens, i'm always disappointed. I think it would be great if the order of comments was always random and scores were never shown (I don't care what people think of other people's comments; how can an opinion have a score? the very idea is preposterous). It would encourage people reading more comments, and not being either fearful of losing points or posting comments just to get a higher score.
Worth noting, the score is intended to be an objective measure of correctness — well sourced, clear, and reasonable comments aught to add to the score, rudeness, questionable sourcing/factualness should not. Ideally.
The problem is, given the current strict comment ordering system & the fact that many (myself included) read comments top to bottom, a 15 in the top position for two hours may in fact be equal to a 3 that's farther below.
I hadn't thought about it when I started writing this, but I'd be curious what comment ordering results a points/time value function would produce. Although a fuzzy random ordering would still be needed to ensure that lower comments got enough viability. So maybe points/time/position-at-vote-time
PS: That said, collapsing comments to promote more equality between highly rated level 1 comments would be an excellent idea.
