I noticed, however, that they've added sorting by "Recommendations" (i.e. "likes"/"upvotes") recently. That's something that was sorely missing earlier.
I still don't understand why the default sorting order is "Oldest", which is basically the most useless - sorting by "Recommendations" gives best user experience, sorting by "Newest" allows new comments to be rated, what does sorting by "Oldest" do?!
All this just creates an echo chamber. Reasonable discourse at the end of the day is limited discourse. The real spectrum of thought however includes abuse and profanity and perhaps aggressive tones.
IMO the best way to deal with this is to train an AI to recognize each of these elements and then make the author reformulate the comment until it's civil enough to be posted.
Give feedback like, the tone of this seems harsh, or it seems like you are using ad-hominem attacks, etc.
Part of an open process is to make this information public, like what comments were rejected and for what reason given by the AI, I guess it would probably use a scoring system or something like that. If you made the process public then it would not be a problem of it censoring anything that people could not agree should be censored.
IMO, the best way is by rating weighted by time. The top comments are the ones that have a lot of points or were posted very recently. That way, new comments have a chance to get upvoted. A lot of sites (e.g. Reddit, YouTube) do this.
I wholeheartedly agree, I think that the decay weighted algorithms are such a neat and useful tool. Not the author, but I found this nice little repo that covers the HN + Reddit algos: https://github.com/clux/decay
I still don't understand why the default sorting order is "Oldest", which is basically the most useless - sorting by "Recommendations" gives best user experience, sorting by "Newest" allows new comments to be rated, what does sorting by "Oldest" do?!