"The solution to social problems is rarely purley technological." Maybe so, but automated recommendation systems have been used rather successfully on sites li

"The solution to social problems is rarely purley technological." Maybe so, but automated recommendation systems have been used rather successfully on sites like last.fm. This is just a logical extension of the idea to comments and articles. "The amount of work it would take to implement such a system would be quite large, and would tax the hosting resources of HN significantly for little benefit." I think the algorithm is quite simple, and shouldn't be very hard to implement. As for taxing the resources of HN, that might not be much of an issue either, depending on just how much it taxes HN's resources and how many resources HN has to throw at the problem. Finally, whether this is of "little benefit" or "much benefit" remains to be seen. Clearly the problem it's addressing is a serious one. And if it does manage to solve it, that would be of great benefit.