The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. Hacker News never really has so many co

The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone. Hacker News never really has so many comments that you can't read through them all in a minute, and if a discussion would grow too large, because it's a threaded discussion system, you might as well give up discussing the story anyway. Just look at "scandal stories" like those related to Heroku and such. Because Hacker News is karma-based as any other comment CMS, I would be more inclined to write my comment as a reply to the top-ranking comment instead of posting a top-level comment myself, since I'm likely to gain more karma from this. This completely destroys the flow of discussion. Comment CMSes will always be gamed by people, but this would probably be the most significant improvement to the quality and linearity of discussions. Options for viewing a discussion differently don't work very well, because then people start discussing in wildly different ways, which makes for a huge mess. That's why, again, a linear/forum CMSes are superior when it comes to discussions, although they don't lend themselves perfectly to a link/self-oriented submission system.