This is something (perhaps the only thing) I miss here which reddit has: /r/bestof. Comments, no matter how good, never end up on /news and so anyone who isn't reading the rest of the discussion in question will never see them.
Come to think of it, is there any technical limitation on having comments submitted as stories? Maybe it's just a cultural issue (i.e., there is no culture of submitting comments as stories here).
There's no technical limitation. In fact bugs have occasionally caused comments to appear on the front page.
A genuine technical limitation is that poll options don't work like other items ('item' is what the code calls posts like stories, comments, and job ads), which caused some trouble last week.
Is it possible to implement features similar to the above without being a ycombinator insider? Since upvotes aren't visible on comments, other than comments you made yourself, how could you calculate it? (Are the upvotes on comments available through an API for example?)
I'm pretty sure that's happened. I even recall someone doing some recursion trick with it - which I just tried, but I can't edit the URL after submission. (Maybe you used to be able to?)
/bestcomments, despite its name, is most-upvoted, which is not the same. The Macro's highlights are more interesting, but at the moment they're collected almost entirely by me and a few others pinging Colleen on chat.
I think a community process for surfacing the best stuff—not by upvoting, but by e.g. nominating one best thing each per day—could yield interesting results.
I imagine HN comments would have a ton of tags generated by such an approach. So, a straight-forward search engine for them could help too. Not a Big Data guy so I can't do recommendations. However, this DARPA-funded, Watson alternative was open-sourced and might do interesting things for HN data:
The algorithms for calculating the best comments on reddit are semi-secret to prevent people from gaming them, but I'm sure you could convince them to give you a copy of the code if you want to see the math behind it. If you need help let me know.
