When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.
When I used the term “readability”, I was admittedly thinking of big sites like Reddit (or Slashdot, though it seems to have less traffic these days), where sorting-by-karma is pretty much obligatory if you don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through dozens of garbage comments for each interesting one. The signal-to-noise ratio is much better here, so maybe “readability” isn’t the right to term to use on LW (though that could change).
But sorting by karma certainly makes discussions much more pleasant/convenient/useful to read on LW as well. Thanks to karma sorting, the worthwhile parts of the discussion are easy to find and you can limit yourself to only reading the best comments.
I don’t find the mixed up chronology to be an issue. In my experience, the only problem with it was that new comments were hard to find, and that issue has mostly been solved by the highlighting of new comments. Your point that it may be confusing to newcomers is valid, but then there are other sites that use sorting by karma as well. It’s not like we’re the only ones using it.