Maybe an oldhead can shed some more light on this: hasn't it always been the case that comments are ranked by a combination of timeliness and votes, as to prevent any single comment to dominate the top of the page for the duration of a story's frontpage time?
Comments will absolutely get rotated so the same comment generally doesn’t dominate. My understanding was there was a lot of manual intervention in this process. I could be wrong.
It’s also true it’s never been a strict ranking by net votes either. Getting a lot of upvotes quickly will elevate a comment.
It’s also suspected that certain users will have their comments upranked or downranked based on their history as well as manual intervention.
Organic ranking still exists but there are many, many thumbs on the scale. Hiding comment karma just makes that less obvious.
I don’t normally engage in HN meta-commentary. In fact, it’s highly discouraged. It’s somewhat ironic that an obvious, egregious case of content manipulation here is directly relevant to the issue at hand: the TikTok ban.
