Comment by schnitzelstoat

I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page.

This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity.

It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvotes and downvotes and the opaque algorithm deciding what gets shown first (or at all).