Comment by milesrout

I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most appropriate place to respond to it.

The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for example) have their own too.