Another change is that comments with scores of -4 are collapsed, regardless of how the preferences are set. Preferences can still be used to collapse more comments.

I normally use LW without JS, so it's a big hassle for me to uncollapse comments. This also means that I don't see recent comments in the sidebar, which means that I didn't realize that everyone was seeing them (as opposed to the few people who go to the recent comments page) and was confused by all this concern about them. I don't have much experience with them, but they seem of dubious value to me. A simpler solution would have been just to delete them.