I don't mean to pick on rottenseed's or anyone else's comments. The point is that the existing community finds many comments humorous or otherwise worthwhile often because of the context it's in and knowledge of the commenter. When taken alone it can look like little more than youtube style drive-by comments, except that we're apparently so proud of them, we put them at the top of every page!

A big part of what makes the commentary here so good is that it often flows like a good party conversation, whether it's serious or silly. In many cases there are a few primary commenters on a thread with several others chiming in with useful info, a good one-liner, an insightful new perspective, etc. I think that is what we want to highlight and show off.

So, I renew my suggestion that instead of having a single featured comment, we have a featured thread, changing every 4-8 hours or so. And I think we should include older posts as well. Off the top of my head, the number of comments would probably be a decent heuristic for determining thread quality, though I suspect that can be refined quite a bit. But I wouldn't want to see it limited by any measure of comment voting, as that would exclude dozens of great threads from before comment voting really started to take off.