First to Post beats Best Post

There's a specific problem with a lot of comment systems: You have to post early to get eyeballs.

This problem is with systems that list posts chronologically or only offer an uncollapsed single threaded view with the most popular point at the top (so most of them!). Then as you go down it can be difficult to spot other posts which have spawned their own interesting discussion - valid arguments are often pushed too far down the stack to be seen by most people, or even onto a separate page where seen by even less people.

Use of discussion monitoring metrics to track which comments are generating discussion and then pushing them up to form 'Roots' of a new discussion thread on the topic, all collapsible to allow easy navigation, would go a long way to combating this issue.

Having more than one Root to the discussion presented at the top of the page represents a small UI challenge of making it easy to see the shape of the discussion and allow a reader to work down the threads that interest them. Potentially this could be solved by combining a diagram of the discussion Tree with a heat map of the activity, then allowing the user to click on a hot section to skip to reading that Root and thread.

Techniques to spot potential discussion spawning late-coming posts could be based around the history of the poster, checking for indicators of 'effort' in the post such as links and cited sources. New posts could be arbitrarily bumped up the reading view for users known to moderate wisely in order to check the value of the content.