

Ask HN: sort comments by time posted? - keiferski

This may be a stupid question, so be nice if it is.<p>But is there any rhyme or reason to the comment structure? It's mildly irritating to go back to a topic and have to sort between old and new comments.
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amarcus
It's actually a good thing.

Considering that a post can hit the front page and then disappear within
hours, I don't think that it is necessary to organize by time.

The most relevant comments (calculated by number of upvotes in a given period)
are at the top and the spammy ones (or those that don't add anything to the
conversation are the bottom).

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keiferski
Wouldn't that lead to the top rated comments being rated even higher, while
newer (but still good) comments are left by the wayside?

This would happen simply because the commenter posted outside of the time the
topic was most popular (most viewers).

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amarcus
It's a tradeoff. Otherwise, you would have spammers commenting on all new
posts.

Sometimes I do see golden comments stuck at the bottom because the poster was
late to comment. It's bad but there really is no easy fix.

It's up to the community to upvote all quality comments (and
submissions)...even if that means having to scroll to the bottom of the post
to find great comments.

Like pretty much everything else in life, the system isn't perfect. I'm sure
PG would listen if you have a better way of implementing comments.

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nomad2986
I think it has something to do with the number of up votes a comment has as
well as the karma of the commenter perhaps.

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Mz
Isn't there a toolbar or something for showing unread posts? I've never tried
it, but I think there is some tool some HNer created to deal with exactly
this. (If so, can someone provide a link?)

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davido
This is wonderful to get back to a thread and read new comments:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imeeonmdbakdmilnnccaddiplgjjhbog)

