Short small comments that provoke pages of thoughtful discussion should be ranked higher than dumb punny one-liner quips or distracting detouring near-suspicious detoured astroturfed irrelevant conversations that often derail important topics.

There should be more than one dimensionality to ranking a comment just like slashdot had.

Downvoting a comment to disagree with it is such a ingrained unfortunate consequence that down votes should actually count more than up votes and all ranking of comments should be by "controversial".

Spam is spam, including "le reddit" humor.

A rank of a comment should be at least somewhat indicative of the the substance of the comment in relation to a point being made... Not whether or not an uncontributing lurker thinks a comment is funny or politically agreeable.

There used to be a unspoken rule that you don't downvote without at least mentioning why. We all know why that went away and we can't say why, But we can think of how to prevent it for the next intellectual chamber we would like inhabit to prevent from it echoing so much we can no longer hear the new ideas.

My (personally) most "provoking" of a comment was:

  >Whataboutism is whataboutism

The other half is presentation. Collapsible comment trees seem good until I hijack every top reply and all others are minimized or top detached visually to be sequitur.

I fear these near-obvious improvements are features, not bugs.