Thanks. I am going to look for those videos, but won't let on if I find them.

I've been thinking on this. IMO one of the problems that Hubski doesn't yet address in a way that is significantly better or different from other places, including Reddit, is that comments are exposed to a 'tragedy of the commons' scenario. As you say, someone voices their valid yet uninteresting top level comment opinion, and upvotes pour in with little regard to its value as a conversational merit.

There are a bunch of ways to address this one issue, some global, and some individual. I don't put too much stock in global solutions (for example, comments with long threads could tend to float up over orphan comments, as they are indicative of better conversation), but sometimes they can nudge things in a better direction. Sometimes they go wrong however, as we could just be featuring flame wars with the same mechanism. One global mechanism i have considered is comment length, or even some sort of language score, but there are other unintended consequences there as well.

As you know, we've typically tried to make the solutions based on user choice. And yes, sometimes I drag my feet too long, and sometimes I push things out too willy-nilly. I've been thinking about a user-specific way to alter the comment space, and I think we could do an experimental run, and see if it helps, and if so, if it can be improved upon. In short, not everyone's comments need to sort equally.

Here's what I am thinking (a rough idea): You can give any given user a rating: poor, neutral, or good. I'm thinking about three face icons on their profile that you see: frown, neutral, smile. Neutral is the default. If you are so motivated, you can rate that user 'poor' or 'good' instead. The user doesn't know how you have rated them, and the way that you rate them only concerns you. However, when you view a post, the way that you rate users provides extra bias to the comment sort. The users you particularly like will tend towards the top, and the users you don't will tend towards the bottom. Everything is still there, but things will tend to sort in a way that reflects your input.

There are comments here that wouldn't induce me to ignore or mute, but I'm typically only going to read them if I am burning time. Also, there are people here that make comments that I almost never want to miss.

It only addresses one issue, but I could see it going some distance to better insulate from dilution. I'd like to give it a run, or perhaps some variation of it, as an experiment.

Nixing shares was a mistake. Actually, now that they are applied to the feed, I like them even more.