FYI I think all comments begin at the top. My comments also start at the top and then fairly quickly move down into upvote order, my karma is well below the top of the leaderboard.
Yes, I believe HN comment sorting uses the same algorithm as news items, where the score of an item is based on both votes and time, decaying over time.
I've ruled this out as a possibility. For instance here I was the 4th comment (there are now 16), I posted 28 minutes ago and I'm still at the top comment slot at only 1 point.
It must be more than just a function of time and score, otherwise any of the new 1-point comments would have superseded mine, but they didn't.
Your average karma is 24, so your comments are weighted much, much more than others (it's one of metrics HN uses to rank comments). Also, your comment is long, which is also a factor (though, not a big one).
If you take comment length + karma per post / comments on post you should end up with reasonably decent comments making it to the top. Ish. It's still never going to be able to fully deal with all the corner cases on a site as large as HN but it's often Good Enough.
It would make sense if your comments were weighted higher having a higher karma, but I think all of our comments start at the top to make sure that at least someone sees them and that they can get upvotes if they are insightful/interesting.
You wouldn't create a top level comment if you weren't hoping to contribute and for it to be read. For it to be more likely to be read, it's better off at the top. So yes, I'd say that people care.
Why comment at the top level in this sort of discussion then?
The topic isn't so much poll position but giving every comment a chance at being noticed so that the better options rise naturally to the top and create a better conversation.
I don't think this is the "I don't care about silly internet points" discussion you think it is.
Well, I personally like to see the most interesting comments at the top. But that creates the inherit problem - the first interesting comment gets stuck at the top and prevents all the newer ones from being seen.
For HN specifically, collapsible comments would make a huge difference. A top-level comment in position one can have dozens of comments under it, making the next comment (which is perhaps only 1 upvote lower) appear far, far down the page.
If you could collapse the top level comments, this problem would evaporate.
This is exactly why HN needs collapsible comments. Not so I can collapse them for my convenience, so that stuff doesn't get buried so easily. Sometimes the top thread is all there is on the first page ... for example, there was this great blog post by raganwald a while. Here's the new version [1] since I assume the posterous one won't be around much longer. And here's the HN discussion of the original [2] in which, as he noted, a comment about IQ testing (completely tangential to the post) took the whole first page.
In that case, you would collapse the top comment chain and be shown nothing underneath, since HN only shows X amount of total comments before requiring you to click More.
I think HN would have to increase the total number of comments per page before allowing collapsable chains.
That's true, once it got that big, but I think the hope is that it wouldn't necessarily remain the top comment under those circumstances. Allowing people to collapse the thread, before it took a whole page, would allow them to see and upvote the other comments if they wished.
HN and reddit should randomize comment placement based on the poster's karma, the ranking of the comment with some notion of number of readers and/or time to normalize the expected value. Ideally, the algorithm would also keep track of how well comments due in their temporarily elevated positions.
