No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
> It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.
I like it. You can make a joke, but if it's bad, you end up paying for it.
I think the problem OP alludes to still exists on HN. While the replies are sorted (partially) based on their score, they're displayed fully expanded. That means a mid-quality comment with 200 points that has so much upvotes because it wasn't bad and was first, will have all of its hundred child comments displayed above the second-best top-level comment. If the discussions under the first comment explode for some reason, there's a good chance a lot of people won't see the second top-level one.
Possible improvement, at a cost of increased JavaScriptitis - auto-collapse child comments under top-level ones, but in a more prominent way than it's done now, so that people would usually be inclined to browse them. And for the love of people in need of CTRL+F-ing for something specific, provide an "expand all" button at the top.
In the parent's example the reddit post blew up so presumably the people making and upvoting puns came from /r/all, not /r/space. This is why some subreddits have opted to exclude themselves from /r/all (which comes with other downsides).
No it isn't. There's nothing about the content of the comments on anything on the internet that automatically means one comment warrants more attention than any other. The reason why we have voting systems is so the community can push things to the top. That's tempered by the fact Reddit moves fast so people who comment later are much less likely to get to the top of a thread, but really it just shows that people who vote in r/space value puns a lot. That's the community you're a part of.
It's like the opposite of HN. Every time I post a joke here it's like setting fire to some karma.