Brainstorming, perhaps highly upvoted comments might be darkened or otherwise highlighted, analogous to how the downvoted are lightened? Upvotes moving a comment upward, within its parent's node, is a quality signal that is weakened when there are few siblings. So outside of root and big nodes, it's hard to scan/skim for high-quality outliers. Which incentivizes making bulk judgments about whether chunks of the hierarchy, or even entire article discussions, are of a quality to be worth reading. And reduces the incentive for creating quality outliers in parts of the hierarchy where they will remain low visibility.
