When people read a blog post, this is how they expect to see the comments!
Hmm… agreed that this is the common practice, but we're not aiming for common. Because LW is different I nearly always click through (from my feed reader) to the comments on a LW post - I sort by Top, and I expect the top comments to be awesome. When reading OB I sometimes click through to the comments - but only when I have time to hunt for the gold that's buried in there.
Let's put it this way: someone interested only in high-rated comments can fairly easily make a visual scan to find the highest scores. Someone who wants to read all the comments chronologically, by contrast, will find the analogous procedure tedious and inconvenient in the extreme.
My main concern, however, isn't even this. It's new users/people unfamiliar with LW mistakenly thinking the comments are chronological when they aren't, and being confused or getting the wrong impression of the flow of discussion. (This has happened before.) The kind of readers s...
Following along from Louie's post and the discussion around it…
How should new visitors to Lesswrong see posts and comments ordered and filtered? (Assume we'll address the new visitors should be introduced to the site issue.) These will remain settings that are easily changed, but how should they start?
Current defaults:
Promoted posts, ordered by recency is our most prominent post list.
Comments are sorted by "Popular", which is Top with a very strong ageing of points (so recently voted comments rise to the top of the list, and very high voted comments fairly quickly drop away).
Options seeded in comments by me below, my karma balance at bottom. Please vote on at least one "Posts:" comment and one "Comments:" comment.