Apologies — I should have taken reinforcement into account and noted that the new algorithm is probably still a lot better than the previous one.

This seems like a neat problem. Would it be hard to go from a python function that takes a set of comment upvote downvote counts and returns a ranking to a comment sorting option? If I don't know much about the reddit internals?

Also, would it be difficult to get a real dataset of comment counts from LW?