I feel your pain. I don't think I like the new system that much. At least so far.
I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.
Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.
Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.
That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...
This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim.
The top-level comments presumably rise and sink based roughly on their karma (though the algorithm also seems to have other considerations, like momentum). But what of the second-tier comments and below? Ripostes are often where the action is.
I might find that I'm reduced to skimming for names that I recognize. That's how the rest of the web works. The web in general has no karma system, so the way to "upvote" something is to repeat it with your byline: You Twitter it or reblog it (or retweet it, or re-reblog it) with a link and your signature, implying a certain degree of implicit endorsement.
I expect that if this system holds we'll start seeing more "amen" comments. I kind of hope so, frankly: Now the only way I will spot an incredibly insightful but short comment buried downthread is if I see a bunch of comments from people I vaguely know saying "amen".
I'm not sure this trend will represent progress, however.
If we want to tinker, consider this: relative rankings on a page. Find a way to distinguish the top-voted 20% of comments from the second quintile, and the second quintile from everything else. (My instinct is not to bother distinguishing things below the top 40%, and of course negative-karma comments presumably are still doing their disappearing act, my favorite cute HN feature.)
At the risk of repeating the legendary eye-searing Orange Name experiment... we could turn the byline of comments in the top 20% a different color from the second 20%, which in turn is a different color from everything else.
Red is probably the wrong color for any of this -- too loud. Think "green". I'm thinking shades of green: Comments in the first quintile have very green bylines, comments in the second quintile have slightly green bylines, and all the other comments have their usual light grey bylines.
I may be off base here, but perhaps HN isn't being designed to make skimming easy. Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content, and then voting on that content, is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.
PG wrote an essay which discussed the 'fluff principle' at work in other voting-based aggregator communities, in which the most superficially sensational content usually rose to the top, beating out longer-form but more intellectually substantial content: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
I think this move by PG is aimed at reducing the herd mentality of voting, and reducing the ability of readers to engage in voting without having engaged the content first.
However, I think your scheme of highlighting comments by quintile is probably a good one. It gets us away from thinking about raw scores, but also serves to reward and reinforce good commenting contributions/behavior by setting an example for others to follow. In order to stave off the herd mentality of 'piling on' upvotes or downvotes, perhaps votes made subsequent to highlighting (or greying out in the case of negative comments) should have half the weight.
Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.
If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...
... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice:
There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.
[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]
This is precisely the problem. Without some idea of what earlier readers think of the comments it is much harder to skim.
Yes. It's like "we want the voting system for our own purposes. You schmucks can just read every comment under an article because your time is not as valuable to us as our desire to prevent mobbing"
I'm sure that's not the case, but that's the way the new system feels.
I don't look at the score to understand a comment, I look at the score to understand the community response to a comment. To me there is just less information now.
I'm used to scanning comments as a way to determine which articles to read. Postings with a lot of comment action usually indicate something emotionally appealing.
Once I go to the comments section, then I filter by score, only looking at comments above a certain threshold (depending on how much time I have). I usually try not to comment, unless some comment has been upvoted to a high level and doesn't make sense to me.
Alas, there are a huge number of comments that I disagree with or fail to understand, and only by knowing the score am I able to determine whether or not my adding to the discussion will help the other readers.
That don't work no more. Now I'm just blindly poking around in the comments section, not really feeling connected to the discussion at all...