By its nature this site does not generally have deep nesting. Adjacency lists are inefficient with deep, narrow nesting. I think that performance would be accep

By its nature this site does not generally have deep nesting. Adjacency lists are inefficient with deep, narrow nesting. I think that performance would be acceptable with that approach. However, nested sets are more elegant. I believe the best approach would be to do the reordering in the application. Retrieve the comments in arbitrary order (probably chronological), and sort the siblings by votes just before you render.