Here's one of those delightful conversations from the Twitter attention-sinkhole:
tommoody: in its options for comment display (oldest, newest, best) disqus defaults to best, which means "most upvotes" in developerspeak
tommoody: the livefyre comment company refers to its most liked (shouldn't that be lyked) comments as "top comments" rather than "best"
tommoody: when in fact, the "best" or "top" comments could be the ones no one "likes" because they're "ahead of their time"
20bux: the comment royalty will soon return to power and tell us which comments are truly top
tommoody: ha ha re: the "comment royalty" -- I'd settle for "oldest" and "newest" and no determination of "best" at all
20bux: yes..... the light of god will shine down upon those worthy comments and their Topness will be self evident
tommoody: reading skill makes the Topness of comments not have to be self-evident and maybe that is a form of divine intervention
20bux leaps to the conclusion that the initial statements were a call for gatekeepers to come back and reclaim comment evaluation from the bean counters, and offers skewering sarcasm. Yet prescient ideas could be overlooked by an editorial elite as well as the voting public ("ahead of their time" could apply to either). Without editors or algorithms, only divine agency is left, scoffs 20bux. Well, no, individual close reading and autodidacticism are still available to us as Turing-complete users. It means you have to skim through all those comments and decide for yourself what is worthwhile. OMG, can that even be done.
Update: Revised and reposted to clarify that the subject is comment evaluation, not moderation. The above dialogue anticipated Twitter's plans to prioritize tweets by typographically enlarging the "best" or "top" tweets based on fav counts, which will now be posted under each tweet.