The context of what's happening in Russia is very important. And very sad:
1. Lenta.ru, one of the biggest Russian news websites (600 thousand visitors daily) mentioned in the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenta.ru
Although Wikipedia says "39 employees out of the total 84 lost their jobs" it is known that they were not fired but were leaving the company together with fired Editor-in-Chief Galina Timchenko as an act against censorship. Some links:
3. Echo Moskvy. "The head of one of Russia's few remaining independent broadcasters, Ekho Moskvy, has been dismissed and replaced by an editor from state media.", "Its editor said it was an "unjust" and "totally political decision" aimed at changing editorial policy."
4. The New Times started a paid subscription to protect itself from censorship a few months ago. This is the only link, in Russian, couldn't find any sources in English: http://www.newtimes.ru/obrashenie-avtora/
It would be much easier to create services publishing news from ycombinator feed if there was a way to easily get current news scores.
The only way to do it now is to get the front page and to xpath your way down to the score html element. For that I would have to know stories identifiers. Sadly, RSS stopped publishing those recently - it now contains them as a part of href attributes for links leading to comments. Not to say I had to rely on HTML page layout.
Things would be much easier if RSS contained a score for each news item.
Hi. I'd like to make a suggestion. May be you should try to enable scores for top level comment in the thread and disable them for other comments inside the thread. This would:
1. Highlight what you call 'good' comments.
2. Prevent fighting in threads for better scores.
3. Force commenters only to write replies in their replies and write a separate comment if they have more to say on the topic.
4. Finally, threads with highly scored top comment are probably 'better' in the same sense.