Something I've noticed lately is the increasing occurrence of the first comment in a thread amassing 20, 30, or more replies. Seldom do these replies represent more than half-a-dozen or so unique points. More often it is people re-hashing the same points with slightly different wording, or people with largely unrelated points attempting to ride the coat-tails of whatever has managed to float to the top.
Either way, this trend seems detrimental both to the depth of discussion (encouraging more noise in the initial replies, at the expense of replies to the appropriate children or grandchildren), as well as the number of original top-level comments visible on the more popular topics. The number of times I've opened a thread to find that there is only one top-level comment on the first page of replies is troubling.
So, can we limit the number of replies to a single comment to something like 10 or so?
